Early in my career (late 90s) I worked at a big company that just loved getting patents, had a big patent wall and did plaque presentations, etc. I got swept up in this and patented some "novel" (:eyeroll:) uses of a device that a partner/supplier made. Yay... I got a plaque and a few bucks, but Big Corp was never going to commercialize these uses, that was clear. They just wanted to run up the patent count.
But the partner corp was just a startup, trying to break into some markets, and now had some of those opportunities encumbered by patents and rightfully viewed our partnership as not in good faith (we didn't tell them about the patent work). The engineers at the partner firm were fairly pissed off at me, since I knew them well on a personal level and my name was on those patents. And naturally Big Corp promptly forgot about that business, never doing anything with the "IP".
I've thought about chucking those patent plaques in a fire, but I keep them in a box as reminder of that little snippet of my career, which I'd otherwise probably block out.