>I once told the CEO of a prospective client company who was using foul language in a meeting with some of his employees, my daughter and myself that he could clean up his language or find another consulting company.
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>He didn't.
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>The meeting lasted about 10 minutes and we were out of there.
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>His CFO called me on behalf of the CEO and asked if we'd reconsider. I asked the CFO is that was his usual behavior. When he told me that it was I told him that we'd pass on that assignment. This man was obviously bullying his employees and that language was one on his bullying tools.

That man has no culture. It is one thing to curse against the injustice of the universe in general, or one's own shortcomings, or even friends shortcomings, or whatever foul deeds came from others - that's legitimate here. To call others bad names, specially subordinates and, even worse, in front of a third party, is just rude and a public confession of incompetence. What's left for the moments of dire need then?

I remember one occasion, when the Novell server was failing and our main tables would crash (luckily, indexes only) and some records may have been lost, and I was trying to fix it on the fly while 18 workstations were happily adding more data and occasionally yelling on the phone. My CEO and my immediate boss were standing behind my back and when the first two fixes didn't work, I was thinking of a third and they started a very nasty pep talk on me, making it sound as if the Rome was burning and I was taking my time to play some pinball before I decide to take a look at the problem. The CEO saw that this wasn't helping, but the boss took his silence as a green light to start harping on me with an even rougher tirade. Then I really burst into a short and lethal sentence, followed with "will you just let me do my job?". I think he was stunned, he practically never heard me utter a sentence of such caliber (actually, it would measure about 18mm, but it's the proportion to my regular language that counts). He shut up, so I had my ten minutes of silence and fixed the problem.

The above rules of moderation are off when in traffic.