I am not sure I have really know any truly bad people, I suppose I have always spend most of my time trying to stay away from them. Maybe in school I might have crossed paths with a few but I never hung out with them long enough to get to know them that well. The worst of them did not last that long and ended up either kicked out or just left.
During my working life I came across quite a few dodgy charters. One that springs to mind was at a Cement factory I used to work at as a contractor. Over the years I had quite a bit of experience working at different Cement Factories. In the end people used to ring up ask for me personally. Sounds great but this one bloke was terrible to work for. Everyone else at my Company was glad he asked for me and not them.
The storey I remember most was we were doing an upgrade in the main control room. It was there busy time as there was a ship in port unloading and trucks queued up out the gate.
We are tracing cables out, with my customer from hell taking the lead, this very important job was in a sensitive area. He tells me to cut and remove a coms cable we had just traced out. I thought he made a mistake at his end and ask him to double check. He went off and told me to get on with it.
The instant I cut the cable to whole factory came to a grinding holt, alarms and flashing lights went off everywhere.
The bloke I was working for went nuts, I don't think I have ever witnessed anybody become a totally unfunctional mess. I had to tell him to calm down and that we just need to rejoin the cable and do a reset. I had it repaired by the time most of the factory knew what was going on.
But the reset took time, other people on site were not happy as busy day just got a lot harder. These sorts of situations are always followed by a lot of please explains. I was prepared for getting the blame, I did cut the cable and I could not really try and deflect on to the guy signing my time card.
There was a big meeting. My customer from hell was doing a good job of reporting how I stuff up and he fixed it. That was until the factory operator who was in the room when it all happened just said Bullshit! Seems my customer from hell had already rubbed a few other people up the wrong way too. The Operator stood up and told everyone exactly what happened. I was in the clear and ended up with a pat on the back.
The customer from hell, got a bit of lesson and slowly started to change.
