Office politics - bad clients you've had?

[vwdan]

My biggest was me being piggy in the middle to two different PM's for a large programme of works. My responsibilities came under both their umbrellas - one was a great guy and an excellent PM, the other was a useless pillock.

We clashed, to say the least. At one stage he was being quite unreasonable and I had to go and steal a whiteboard, we wrote down all my tasks and I said "Right, pick one and I'll do that - then pick another." It was going great, we developed a priority list and I thought I'd cracked him until right at the end he hand waved to half the board and said "Oh, obviously you'll need to be getting on with that at the same time". Funny to think about now, but at the time I was raging and came close to being quite unprofessional.

He managed to make what should have been an easy life stressful. Fortunately the other PM clocked it and gradually managed to take ownership of the bits I was involved in.

Annoyingly, outside of that he wasn't actually that bad a guy and was quite interesting to chat to. But, professionally, I wouldn't go near him. That said, he is the only person since school to moan about my internet usage!

[northernladyuk]

Always try to steer well away. Not interested at all.

Was thinking about one or two where you get dragged in and wonder if others have had similar. Generally, my method is go with the flow, but keep managers happy because they sign the timesheet.

Sometimes though its difficult not to get stuck in the middle..

I remember one place. Senior permie who had a different manager wanted me to do one thing, manager the other. Jeez. Nightmare that was. Some days I felt like saying to them - guys sort it out yourselves and leave me out of it. Hated each other but they seemed to want to use me in the middle.

Keep calm and invoice....

Anyone else got any horror stories?

Oh the horrors of being a BAU support monkey.

[TestMangler]

National Australia Group. No sense of humour.

I cracked what, even if I say so myself, was the best gag ever cracked at a change control meeting

Got terminated, on 5 days notice, when I had 8 days of my contact remaining, so maybe someone in there had a sense of humour.

[NotAllThere]

Mods, cant we give Psycho here his own sub forum ?

Put him on your ignore list and stop whining.

Can we ban Vetran please. Reason - About as funny as a dose of piles.

Would like to, but it would be false premise. Because he's not as funny as a dose of piles.

[woohoo]

National Australia Group. No sense of humour.

I cracked what, even if I say so myself, was the best gag ever cracked at a change control meeting

Got terminated, on 5 days notice, when I had 8 days of my contact remaining, so maybe someone in there had a sense of humour.

What was the joke?

[northernladuk]

What was the joke?

PC

[TestMangler]

What was the joke?

Arguing my point with some wrinkly old change control manager tart, she wasn't convinced about my assertion that the change I wanted done would have no adverse effect on service.

She (mistakenly) uttered the phrase, "I've been burned before".

I said, "They normally only do that if you don't drown".

[BR14]

Arguing my point with some wrinkly old change control manager tart, she wasn't convinced about my assertion that the change I wanted done would have no adverse effect on service.

She (mistakenly) uttered the phrase, "I've been burned before".

I said, "They normally only do that if you don't drown".

[NotAllThere]

One project, the permie PM was a bit unstable. Apparently it stemmed from when he worked in some African country and went for a little walk, but didn't take his gun (he wasn't a soldier - I'm not sure what he was doing there, nor exactly where it was). He was attacked by a man with a machete, and only lived becaused a colleague happened to be in the same area.

The project was a death march and it was abundantly clear that we'd never make the proposed go-live date. Things like that during the main testing phase all the permies were on holiday, didn't help. Anyway, as a result of the trauama he was prone to fits of anger. He wanted updates on my team's progress every day. Since this was the days before decent project tracking software, these constant updates slowed us down somewhat, triggering said fits of anger, which also slowed down our work until he ran of out steam and stormed off.

Apart from that, he was a very decent, kind bloke.

I finally had to leave when I was reading the paper during my lunchbreak and he demanded an update, and I just said "I'm on my lunch" and carried on reading. Frankly it was a relief to get off the project, although it took threats of legal action to get the last invoice paid.

[MarillionFan]

London Clancy

A real bullying culture. Especailly with an IT are crap, can;t deliver stuff. I was told I'd get no help from stakeholders and they were right.

Didn;t like the attitude of senior managers from the start, but having popped in to see a stakeholder to confirm something, he went mental screaming, shouting 'get out', totally unprofessional. So wandered off and as I walked through the secretarial pool muttered the words 'what a twat'

A bit later the PM and someone from HR wanted to talk to me as one of the secretaries had reported me.

So I explained what happened and how rude he'd been. HR then said, 'Yes, we don't use the t word when referring to colleagues, especially this one'. 'If it happens again, please refer to him as a c**t as that what he is, c**t. Is that now understood?'

And that was the end of the chat. They were all like it.

I gave my notice in the next day.