If I don't let go of this...

it will drive me bonkers.  So with this blog I am putting it down and walking away from it.  Today I happened to be in a position to overhear someone trying to help someone with a problem in an area where I have a fair amount of expertise.  Now I like to think I'm smart enough to know what I don't know and to take the time out to look it up.

As I continued to listen to these two people talking about the same thing over and over and getting nowhere, I pulled out my trusty iPhone and looked up the answer.  I happened to be right.  But it wasn't my place to interject myself into that conversation.  Just because someone is giving someone else bad information is not license for anyone to intercede.  In this particular case, since the advice-giver strongly believes they know as much (if not more) than I do about this subject, pushing myself into a situation where I wasn't invited would just cause ill will.

That means I know of an instance where someone got bad advice.  Advice that will cost them money they might not have owed.  It was a case of the advisor not getting the right information from the advisee, in order to make an appropriate recommendation.

You know I love movie similies so I will use one here.  In "The Sum of All Fears", Ben Affleck as "Jack Ryan" is trying to get some information to the President, to prevent a nuclear war.  He says "my job is to get the right information and get it into the right hands."  For a moment, I was Jack Ryan and yet I knew there was no way to pass on the information I had.

I will not spend any further time trying to find a way I could have acted differently.  There was no better choice for me.  Odds are good I'd have just pissed both of them off and that didn't happen.