>Good idea, this is what I do. It mostly works since he is anti-social. He has stopped coming to me directly with unreasonable requests since when asked through me to the boss, the requests wouldn't get approved. I think the boss doesn't have a problem saying no to him through me. The bulk of people in the dept use this strategy too and for the most part it works. The giving of benefits in response bad behaviour is demoralizing people in the dept. I know of 1 person that has left because of his behaviour, there probably have been others over the years.

My strategy was... a little weird.

Once we had a CEO hire his own wife, to start the user education department (which I think never took off). She was teaching programming in a high school in another city, and I've met some of her students online - and heard ridiculous stories, about how her classes consisted of copying the cobol source (her husband wrote) to the blackboard and then they all had to copy that into their copybooks. Once they even stole the key to the IT room and came after school to compile her source, and then just left her the listing of errors on her desk next time. When she finally quit the school and came to work with us, the school threw a party. I've seen her diploma - average is just about 0.5 above minimum.

So such a person comes to work with us and immediately has the same salary as I do. My M.O. was to be extremely to annoyingly polite to her, which everyone would notice. Perhaps she noticed too, but either couldn't pinpoint what exactly was wrong, or didn't get it at all.

About a year later, we took different paths - three more wives (of CEO's inner gang) were hired, two guys were fired (one of them the co-founder, me being the other co-founder of the company), and I quit and started the next company (with the same guy as partner). Few years later, two guys from the inner gang split and started a new competing company, and the CEO had a lot of trouble trying to fire their wives :).