Re: Can I get that in writing?
The boss I referred to as "El Turkey" was very much a "implement this" dictatorial manager; and everything had to be done in "two weeks" regardless of the complexity.
Implement a full secure remote access solution / extranet using a product we've never used, had zero in-house understanding on how the product worked, and with no outside expertise to implement it? GO, your two weeks started yesterday.***
Redesign the entire network over four physical sites and several thousand endpoints, and with a complex wireless configuration from the ground up? TWO WEEKS.
Then there was the infamous Christmas day demand that I make a large number of sweeping changes to our environment OR ELSE, based on the recommendation of a vendor that I had gotten exactly five minutes to skim through. My response (with the CIO openly CC'D) was "sure, this will take down the production floor* as the changes you want require a 20 minute downtime per VM**** as I have to power off the VM and hand-edit the .vmx file**, and will have absolutely zero effect as the change you are wanting was deprecated. Are you willing to formally proceed with this change?"
The CIO got to him first, and IIRC, the reply to me was "take the rest of the day off, don't make any changes, I'll deal with him" or words to that effect.
* The nature of our company is that weekends and holidays are actually the busiest times for us, so asking this change right then wasn't going to happen to begin with, but I decided to play chicken and call his bluff.
** This is something that would also cause VMWare to say "NOPE NOPE NOPE NO SUPPORT FOR YOU!", especially in a production environment.
*** He did this a lot. We ended up trying every. single. remote access solution out there, and within 4 months of his departure, went back to the system we were using prior. We tried the rest, and went back to the best (for us, anyway.)
**** The production floor for each location is run by a group of about 12 VMs, not including any of the primary infrastructure servers. multiply that by two locations and a third data center, and realize that it would have been a multi-week project that would have done absolutely nothing but destabilize the environment even moreso that it already was.