Mr. 'Less use than a broken pencil'
First post from a long time lurker...

As other people have noted, people who work for IT companies tend to be a pretty odd crowd. I should know, being a bit geeky myself. However, they are nothing compared to the caliber of employee you meet at Government research centres. I worked (and still work) for a certain IT services company, so occasionally I would work onsite for various customers.

So there I was, just out of Uni, with my first proper job onsite with a customer. On my first day I was warned about X, and told that I should be grateful that he wasn't there. Uh oh. The next day I met him. He obviously was a smart guy but he was impossible to work with.

His quirks included:

- A pathological desire to prevent other people from working. He once made the mistake of asking one of my fellow contractors for a appraisal review. It read 'If you have a broken pencil you can't do any work. X actively prevents everyone from working. He is therefore less use than a broken pencil.'

- A bizarre fetish about Minis. He thought that any car that couldn't have had a walk on role in the Italian Job was a soulless box on wheels. His was a rusty death trap. But it Had Soul.

- An equally bizarre sex life. One of my colleagues was a quiet, unassuming type who had been born again a few years previously. X's reaction to this was tell him in gruesome detail what he had been up to with his long suffering girlfriend the previous night. This apparently involved anal sex and coprophilia. Nice.

- Insane nationalism. Yes, fine, be proud of being Welsh, but not everything in the whole world revolves around your national identity and what the English did (real or imagined) several centuries ago. We know you made most of that stuff up.

- Angry outbursts. We were never more than ten minutes away from an irrational explosion of pent up rage. Obviously the bum fun wasn't doing it for him. Luckily he came in at 10am, had a two hour lunch break and buggered off again at 4pm, so we did get some respite from him.

So, after eighteen months of telling us long suffering contractors that we were money grabbing scum, he left to become... a contractor. His new company then tried to place him onsite in his old job. Now for some funny reason, his old employers wouldn't let him anywhere near them.

Oh how we laughed.
(whydontyou, Wed 30 Jan 2008, 9:28, 1 reply)

Thats not right
Why did I look up coprophilia....
(bakircioglu, Wed 30 Jan 2008, 14:39, closed)