Mr Mitchell
A thoroughly unpleasant character.

I was working at a pharmaceutical company as an IT contractor, the vast majority of software developers, project managers, etc were all contractors. Mr Mitchell was taken on as a permanent member of staff, his role was as a document writer i.e. to provide instruction manuals for the software which we were writing and the associated hardware: automated stores, things that suck stuff out of tubes and squirt it into plates, that type of thing.

Our team leader left for a better paid contract so the big boss decided to promote his in-house boy to the vacant position. He was given a grandiose title along the lines of "Chemical Informatix Technical Manager" despite having no knowledge or experience of:
Chemicals
IT
Technology
Management.

He succeeded in making himself universally hated from board level to the cleaning lady. He had an inferioty complex about us contractors, he would try to score points by ridiculing us if we made a mistake. He would tell us that we were mediocre and could easily be replaced with more intelligent people. He told the high-ups that he "couldn't work with those people". He did what he could to generally piss us off:

Timesheets - he would insist that we, well, mostly me, knocked an hour of our timesheets for "coffee breaks" before he'd sign them. He used to sit in our office some days noting down the times which we enetered and left the room.

Squeaky door - he had an office seperate to us developers. The room we were in had squeaky door hinges so he came in one saturday morning and oiled the hinges so that he could enter the room without making a sound, trying to catch us out. He told this to the project manager who naturally informed the rest of us.

Meetings - many of the contractors lived a long way from work so we tended to work ten hour days and not come in on Fridays, this was a well established practice. He would arrange meetings for 9am on Friday thereby forcing some to make a 200 mile round trip to attend a one hour meeting.

Bully - he reduced to tears one of the testers telling her that she was no good and everything she did was wrong. She was really good at her job!

His most famous moment of fucktardery was as follows:

We were trying out our ordering system on the automated robots and sucky squirty things for the first time. The functional specification documents provided by the manufacturers of the robots were a bit vague about "units of measure" and we had placed orders for quantities of gunk in litres. It turned out that we should have been using millilitres, we were getting specs of solution rather than filled tubes. Fine, we now knew for sure what unit to use and could adjust the software easily enough.

Mr Mitchell came into the lab and asked us how it was going. We explained to him that we had to change the units we were using but apart from that it all worked. He then came out with the following:

"6.02214179 times 10 to the power of 23", he really had memorised the number to that precision.

"What?" we asked in unison.

"Avogadro constant" he beamed.

"What's that got to do with anything?" we asked.

He smirked and said "Well, if you don't know that, you shouldn't be working here" and, victorious over the proles, he walked away in triumph leaving us in stunned silence.

They got rid of him in the end...

Apologies for geekiness.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 12:02, 1 reply)

The fucking Avogadro constant?
Sounds like the worst sort of pendantic, childish shit.
(Scritty Bakerman., Sun 21 Jun 2009, 9:20, closed)