[gaius]

At one company, the way it worked was a PM would come to you and say something like, can you install the database on the new servers for project X? And you would say something like, no, because those servers haven't been delivered by the vendor yet.

Then the PM would go to your manager and say engineer Y REFUSED to help me with my project. All the PMs did this at that company, so I assume it was a technique taught on whatever training courses they were sent on. Well we all soon got wise to it, and after we started saying no to them in ever more "creative" ways, they soon learned a new technique...