People Crying at work

[Batcher]

I saw it happen once.

One ClientCo was an outsourcer and had TUPEd over some permies as part of the deal. As is the way of the world, the permies had had a nice cushy job for years with a nice pension lined up. The ClientCo took these permies and threw them in the deep end, sink or swim style.

I was in a project meeting where all except the guy were contractors. He was showing real signs of stress over his tasks in the project but we all said we would help him out and get him through it. Nothing seemed to help him though and he ended up in tears. He resigned 2 days later without having another job lined up.

[DodgyAgent]

I once got a contractor to buy a round. he collapsed in tears and ran off never to be seen again.

[MyUserName]

I have been incredibly stressed at work.

My wife was pregnant with our second child and we had been told that there was a 1 in 4 chance he would have a lethal genetic defect which would mean he was starve to death within a day or two of being born, we were not financially stable but were not destitute. At the same time there was a problem with my manager (I was permie then) being an interfering micromanager and there being an intermittent bug on a project I worked on.

I eventually, after chasing the system round for over a week, worked out it was a problem caused by 2 different numbers being rounded and rather than a coding error the reports were accurately reflecting the reality of the transactions. I explained it to him again and again and again even using numbers less than 20 to show how diving by 2, rounding the numbers and adding the results was not always the same as rounding the original.

He just did not get and got more and more worked up about me not being able to fix it. He showed me the code he had written in 5 minutes which fixed the problem. I explained that all he had done is move the error to a different column (and even pointed at the actual column where the error now was to show him). He did not understand and suddenly there was a meeting to discuss my competence etc. I was having trouble sleeping etc. and was genuinely worried that he might push me too far and I would start throwing punches.

Whilst my response was just to shut down and become uncommunicative I can well imagine other might burst into tears.

[MyUserName]

I once got a contractor to buy a round. he collapsed in tears and ran off never to be seen again.

Probably when he realised you were an agent!

[eek]

Whilst my response was just to shut down and become uncommunicative I can well imagine other might burst into tears.

When someone did that to me as a permie, I waited until there was enough things of his that depended on me to utterly screw him and resigned, walked out the door and sent a 4 week sick note due to stress....

The biggest end customer (who I knew far better than he did) then had a whale of a time applying pressure on him due to an unfixable bug until the customer finally announced that he'd got a third party contractor in who had solved the problem at no cost in 5 minutes...

:

[FatLazyContractor]

Perfectly normal for a normal human being to possibly break down when stress reaches their respective thresholds.

As to big grown up men and all that bulltulip is normal AtW stuff. Now who's up for d!ck-size-comparisons here?!

[FatLazyContractor]

Big boys don't cry.

AtW you sexist! The point is about "people" which has both boys and girls

[FatLazyContractor]

I once got a contractor to buy a round. he collapsed in tears and ran off never to be seen again.

A round fat hooker?

[vetran]

Probably when he realised he had given you his references and now you didn't love him anymore!

FTFY

[original PM]

What I have found is that is not so much the fact that people may fail it is because they are scared of the consequences of failing which cause the emotional response.