Re: The weedy bloke
I have trained many, many new PFYs, some male, some female, most green and keen, some healthily cynical. I always start with a brief explanation of the pecking order in the company (me, then the other data sysadmins in my team, then the software sysadmins, then their boss, then sundry bit players like marketing, suppliers, HR, etc). Almost all of them have gone on to happy and productive careers, and those that don't, well, they don't last long. Moral of the story: knowing your job is important, but knowing how to avoid idiots is utterly vital.
Back on topic: I'd like to nominate the author of SharePoint to this gathering of bastards, with a view to making him/her the chairman when the current one resigns/dies of old age/is helped under a taxi after annoying Simon or Stephen. I've used a countless number of poorly designed software packages over the years (including, I'll admit, several of my own making), and my conclusion is that SharePoint is so wilfully bad that it must have been deliberately designed to be so. Not just designed to "encourage" users onto a more expensive product, like Photoshop Elements, not just hastily put together and in desperate need of some attention, like Stibo Workbench, but actually designed to drive its users over the edge. Who knows, maybe the project manager owns a chain of pubs and wanted to drive people to the bottle. Speaking of which, thanks Simon and have one on me.