The best On Call story I've read by far.

For some reason, I had a vision of Victoria Wood looking askance and wondering aloud how long it would take to wash that out of the candlewick bedspread.

I'm pretty sure I've met someone very much like tyyrant, he was an asshole who demanded certain software/hardware that were proprietory, vendor locked and incompatible with any existing system the schools had.

The guy had a CV full of failed "projects" and half arsed ideas which had sucked IT budgets dry across several schools.

Sadly I work with one at the moment (hence Anon)...

Joined us from another company where his CV and his constant referring back to his work there shows him as the man who delivered a significant number of major projects for that company.

The problem is some of us also used to work at that company including on some of "his projects" and not one of us can remember him or how he was involved in these projects he has claimed to have delivered. We also checked with the people he claims to have worked with and the same blank.

It might not matter, but he's terrible at his current job :-(

I hate it when people do this.

An ex-boss would start 80% of discussions with "When I was at $EX-JOB, we did..."

I did eventually ask him to stop doing that and to his credit he mostly did.

I still left 2 months later :-)

I certainly worked with one who'd apparently arrived with glowing references* - it turned out the former employers had given him the references as part of his termination. He once phoned me three times in the early hours of a Monday morning, due to a spreadsheet problem that could easily wait until later - not that I answered the phone; that one resulted in an informal complaint to the MD with the warning that next time it would be a formal complaint to the corporate.

*Back when references said more than, "X worked for us from ... to ...)

I got a 1AM call from the CEO of a company I did consulting for. The home genset I had installed for him as a side project didn't work in a power failure. He was completely impervious to answering questions intelligently over the phone. His company was a rather large account, so I told him I'd be there as soon as I could. I was in Palo Alto, he was in Half Moon Bay, and naturally it was raining.

Some 40 minutes later, I discovered that said CEO was a) legless, and b) had managed to actually fire up the genset, but couldn't figure out the simple transfer switch. I had even labeled it "Genset/OFF/PG&E" ... He was flipping it between OFF and PG&E when I arrived. Somehow the concept of a three position switch eluded him, despite having been walked through the simple procedure not a month prior.

So a late-night mad dash in the rain to flip a switch for a drunk. I stopped doing personal favors for corporate clients after that, no matter how lucrative.

...walked through the simple procedure...

Didn't you mention he was legless?! SCNR

Obviously, I'll name no names, but at a previous workplace I was often called on by an almost-manager (who totally behaved liked a manager) for "special tasks" (entirely professional, I can assure you).

While most of those tasks fell logically under my programming purview, the day he asked me to write documetation about an EU directive that he was supposed to be the expert on, I politely declined and indicated that I did not have the necessary expertise in that area.

Funnily enough, he didn't ask much from me after that, but I didn't mind because he was the kind of guy who took credit for everthing he asked everyone else to do.

As a young teacher I did an analysis of our Special Needs departmental results. Lots of numbers involved.

Head of department thanked me mildly and I heard nothing more. Was a bit miffed to be honest.

Then a month or so later she came to me and asked for me to write a summary, because she'd been asked to present the analysis to the LEA- and didn't really understand it.

The nasty piece of work had obviously passed it off as her own.

But education is full of Nasty Ambitious Types like that. Mostly they're crap teachers, ( because the good ones are in the classroom,) but are really good at spotting which band wagons to jump on to, which schemes to promote as The Next Best Thing - and more importantly, when to jump off. They tend to be the ones who get to the top jobs and start inventing policy leaving behind them trails of chaos, wasted money and wrecked careers.

I've seen teachers spend months being trained in some wonderful new scheme, ( sometimes genuinely so) only for it to be abandoned a few months after they started to implement it, as the LEA person sponsoring it had moved on to a new project. I've seen specialist teacher trainers recruited and dragged across from the other side of the world to train schools in another wonderful new scheme, only to find that by the time they got settled the scheme was being cut back and the individual responsible for sponsoring it had moved on to some new shiny, leaving them with no job to do. I've seen teams of teachers pressured to promote a scheme they knew was rubbish, then once they were identified with it the officer who'd pressured them into it started repudiating it, because it was rubbish, as they'd told him, leaving them holding the smelly can. I've seen Local Authority Advisory teacher stand up in front of a school staff and declare that the Latest Thing was the only way forward and the previous method was always obviously rubbish, within days of having been declaring the previous thing the Best Possible Way to teach that subject.

And these people got promoted higher and higher.

One day I was called into a director's office, he asked me to help move his documents from his old laptop (a very well specced 6 month old Dell that soon found it's way onto my desk) to his new laptop (one I expected to inherit in another 6 months).

He left me alone while I worked.

A folder called Staffing Plans landed on the new laptop's drive, and being a curious type, I decided to take a look at the contents, the staffing plans folder contained several hundred JPEGs and zero documents.

The JPEGs were all of the director and a naked female who wasn't his wife, instead he was holidaying with our receptionist.

I'm not the sort of person who can use that sort of information as blackmail material, instead I renamed the folder and moved it over to his family's OneDrive where I hoped his wife may stumble across it.

I don't know if that happened, as I left the company not long afterwards...

Renamed to "Stuffing Party"? So it looks similar to him and he won't notice until too late.

...and from that day forward, you saw the receptionist quite differently...every time you passed the front desk.

Yes, been there and done that in my previous role in education.

From the business manager who bought a sign in system without doing any research or comparisons (guess what - didn't integrate with our MIS, wasn't very good, and there were much better and cheaper alternatives available) to the new school group "server guy" who bought a new server to replace ours, only for us to find out it was hopelessly underspecced for our needs - but I was already on my way out by then!

Bes one was an officious depty head who had recently insisted everyone read certain policies - this week it's first aid, next week it's pupil code of conduct, etc. As well as having some fun pointing out how out of date everything was (the "site rental" policy had a fax machine available, despite the line being disconnected five years previous) I managed to knock him back in front of half the school at lunch.

DH "This is Bill, who will be starting as an English teacher next term. You are getting a laptop ready for him?"

Me "Yes of course, in fact it's ready now"

DH "Good, then hand it over"

Me "Sorry, thats in breach of the staff laptop policy - which says you don't get a device until your contract starts - and also the staff acceptable use policy, which says issing a laptop needs Appendix A signing and countersigning"

Wandered off and finished my lunch...

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I did tech support in a university department. The prof decided to make a know-nothing lecturer oversee the helpdesk: ie me. This petty tyrant decreed I must work 9-5 because that's what "professional" helpdesks did. It didn't matter almost nobody but him was in the department at 9am or that many staff worked in the early evening and needed IT support after the day's lecturing ended. I was to be at my desk between 9-5 regardless because that's the way the petty tyrant wanted it to be.

A week or so later, the petty tryant demanded I fix his computer. At just before 5pm. After taking a quick look, the following conversation happened:

Me: "Sorry. It'll take 20+ minutes. I'll fix it tomorrow morning." [It wouldn't but PT was too clueless to know that.]

PT: "Can't you stay on for a few minutes? I've got this important thing to finish today."

Me: "No, I can't. You decided my working day stops at 5pm and rules is rules. If I stay late, I'll miss my train home."

PT: "But...."

Me: "See you tomorrow. I have a train to catch. Have a nice evening."

Now I could have worked late and still caught that (hourly) train. Which I'd gladly have done for anyone else in the department apart from the petty tyrant. Who was one of those "do you know who I am?" arrogant arseholes. However it was beer o'clock and petty tyrant needed to learn the hard way who actually was in charge of tech support.

His 9-5 edict got quietly buried and he stopped bothering me.