Broken Arrow
I'm not very creative with my skiving - bog standard web/messenger/origami type stuff - although to be fair to myself I think I may be major factor in my company going bust shortly. Huzzah.

However, while at Uni my mate Ed used to work at BAe on a summer job on the development of the tracked Rapier anti-aircraft missile for the Army. Several thousand of Britain's finest engineers worked on this project, delivering the first prototype on time and on budget. The Army came down to the factory - south east somewhere, and signed off their acceptance, loaded the thing up onto a trailer and drove off towards Salisbury plain for testing.

However due to the customary rush hour car-park on the M25, the driver takes an unscheduled diversion down some country lanes, under a low bridge... cue one huge pile of broken electronics, an obliterated missile system, and back to the drawing board for BAe.

The skiving came in the second time around, when BAe's development engineers couldn't be arsed doing the thing properly again, spent most of the time tossing around emailing each other and playing tic tac toe, cheated by using all the test data from the first time round, and consequently tracked Rapier v.2 was massively over budget and hideously late, and kept going wrong with basic errors like going left when it was supposed to go right.

£10m skive - British Engineering dont you love it.
(redredrobin, Wed 27 Apr 2005, 17:38, Reply)