Try to make a long story short. For four years our auditors from Deloitte have been harping on a "weakness" in our IT internal controls - basically they want us to make a VERY expensive change to our IT structure to address a really minor issue. I've made a case every year that we have mitigating controls over the area that address their observation. On today's call, the engagement manager hinted that they might consider some kind of adjustment to our audit report if we continued to ignore their suggestion. This dragged on for a good 10 minutes. I was doing a good job of keeping cool until my boss, our CFO, asked why I had been ignoring the issue.

At that point I went absolute Les Grossman on the entire room. I vented 4 years of rage and frustration with these clowns. Bombs were definitely dropped. It probably lasted 4 full minutes. When I was done, there was about 30 seconds of stunned silence, followed by the engagement partner saying that we had probably discussed the issue enough, then quickly moving on to the next point.

Afterwards I apologized to my boss for losing my temper, fully expecting a reprimand, and instead she congratulated me for "putting those guys in their place".

I'm not really proud of myself, but it was kinda funny.