The Quote That Outran Me: A Government Training Surprise

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There’s something strange—and a little surreal—about hearing your own words quoted back to you a decade later.

Especially when you didn’t know they were ever written down… and wouldn’t have remembered them without a nudge.

It was a regular day in the office when one of my employees—a sharp U.S. Coast Guard Commander—walked in holding a printout from a training course he’d just finished.

He looked at me, deadpan, and asked: “Sir… is this you?”

I looked down and saw a quote being circulated in a senior acquisition course, attributed to: “Glen Maylone, RIA.”

“Hey, we are the government. We never miss an opportunity to waste time and money.”

I burst out laughing.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me. Malone with a Y to make Maylone… and RIA? Yep. That’s Rock Island Arsenal. Guilty as charged.”

He laughed too, then explained how it came up. The professor had flashed the quote on screen during a lesson on procurement inefficiency—the long, twisted path from designing a weapon system to actually getting it fielded.

When the Commander saw my name, he immediately asked, “Where’d you get that quote?”

The instructor answered, “A student said it years ago. I wrote it down and have used it ever since.”

To which the Commander replied, “I work for that guy.”

Apparently, the professor wasn’t surprised.

And there it was—my off-the-cuff remark, tossed out years earlier during an acquisition class at Rock Island Arsenal, probably while I was running on fumes and sarcasm. Now, floating in the ether. Circulating as lore. A quote with no author credit card, no trademark—and certainly no royalty check.

Funny thing is, once I saw it, I did remember saying it. I even remembered the setting—those giant stone buildings from the 1800s, and one of those PowerPoint-thick days when you’re stuck in mandatory training while still running high-tempo war production post-9/11. HMMWV armor, Gunner Protection Kits, Small arms parts, Artillery pieces. Real stuff with real stakes. High stress. Low sleep.

Honestly, it was probably just me trying to stay awake—cutting through the fog of jargon with a little gallows humor. Because if you’ve ever sat through one of those acquisition deep dives, you know: there’s plenty of opportunity for truth-telling masquerading as comedy.

So yeah—turns out my sarcasm became some gelatinous form of training doctrine. A quotable moment. A training artifact.

Maybe it’s not quite the polished gravitas of a presidential speech:

“Ask not what your country can do for you…”

But it’s probably more useful to the average government employee. If nothing else, it might make them chuckle. Or at least help them stay awake.