Outside Vancouver’s Metro Theatre is a plaque commemorating a play that at least two people thought was terrible.

It describes how writer Raymond Hull was complaining about the atrocious production he had been watching while standing in the theatre’s lobby during an intermission.

A tall stranger who was also in the lobby then tried to explain to him how such an awful play made it to the stage.

The stranger, Laurence J. Peter, told Hull that every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Workers, he argued, keep getting promoted until they are in over their heads.

The conversation in the lobby, which occurred sometime in the early-to-mid 1960s, sparked both men’s imaginations and ultimately gave birth to their 1969 best-seller The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong.