Right out of engineering school, my father had a few key members of his engineering firm get sick or pass away. My mother asked me to help him. My first project was a complicated, major renovation of a very old building. I worked day & night to get it right. A month or two later, my father and I went to present it to the engineering staff at this client. Quite quickly, the chief draftsman started ripping the crap out of the design and taking personal shots at my father. He was wrong and way beyond rude. My father was an honest, brilliant engineer.
My Dad and I get out to the parking lot after the meeting. I won't get in the car. I'm losing it to the point my poor father is trying to physically restrain me from going back into the building and beating the living shit out of our client's chief draftsman. I had fought a lot in private school because I couldn't stand bullies. My father nearly yanked me out a few times afraid of lawsuits from beating the crap out of those pricks.
My father begged and pleaded for me to get in the car so I did. On the way back to the office, he told me that he would never lose his cool because under his breath he'd say "that BS just cost you $5,000" when someone got out of line.
So we went through eleven meetings with this asshole - changes, changes and more changes - many of them stupid. I kept my cool. Now, we were at a place to present the final drawings, etc for the 12th meeting. I told our chief draftsman to take the original drawings and just put the revision history on the bottom right hand corner ending with revision 11 and that is what we submitted. The asshole pontificated about how we had "finally got it right" (with the original design we had submitted months before) and wasn't it worth all the effort to get to this point.
That is what was built. Worked like a charm. They loved it. About two years later, I told my father what I'd done so that if that asshole every bothered him again, he could tell his boss to look at the first and last set of drawings and the hundreds of thousands in engineering the asshole cost his company.
I never lost a wink of sleep over that.
It was a good lesson because in my company we implemented "the asshole fee" - every time a prospective client was an asshole, you didn't get mad and beat the shit out of the guy - you bumped the quote by an asshole fee because it was going to cost you more to deal with an asshole anyway. If there were too many asshole fees, the asshole had priced himself out of being a client or getting you to do more work and done you a favor because he was going to be an enormous problem.
I slept better with that.
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