In this article, the author reflects on his stay at Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI) and on his life after it. ALI was not just a piece of the state bureaucracy, what some civil servants ironically insisted on describing as the "burden on providers." ALI had been a long time in the making and rested on some very solidly established ideas about the value of observing fellow professionals at work in order to help them do better. For people who had experienced ALI, it was a passion--a passion to improve the quality of adult learning and to find a way to do it quickly and decisively.