>We have physician faculty who behave like selfish little children - lately some of them have been asking for expensive renovations to their office space just because it would be nice. They use their status to try to intimidate the business manager who is responsible for keeping us all financially afloat, and is a really great guy.

At my first programming job we happened to have the company HQ down the hall. Two of my school buddies worked there, one as a CEO's spy (i.e. something around security) and the other as the fire marshal, which meant they were usually hanging around and doing nothing. Once during a coffee break they asked me to help manouver one huge desk into an office. Now to do that we had to move another desk from the office across (the hall was really narrow), which we just temporarily pushed into the next office on the side. Now this side office was relatively large, and was the empire of one lady... eh, comrade, who was "50 kilos with bed" (i.e. very thin), regularly nervous, in charge of plan and analysis (i.e. nothing) and whose husband was somebody big in the city's branch of The Party. She came along just when we were finished with getting the new desk in, and were having a break before replacing the temporarily moved desk back to where it was.

She totally freaked out - thought she was getting to share an office with someone (new desk being pushed in) and nobody told her. She pushed the desk back singlehandedly in two seconds. And it took the three of us about ten minutes to put it there.

The only other time I saw her burst like that was when I once had to retype her speech... and produced an extra version, where all meaningless phrases were replaced with regular language. She claimed I destroyed her speech. Then I just printed the original and said "oh, sorry, wrong version" :).

I wish I had both versions today...