[noisy_boy]

This hit too close to home. As a subordinate and as a manager, I've always felt totally comfortable saying, "I'm not sure but I'll check this".

As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.

Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.

[snorkel]

Pretenders are my favorite type of manager to mess with. When they ask if ping requests filled up the disk I would gladly "check" that for them using the "system diagnostic regression suite" and ... nope ... everything looks good there ... But hmmmm ... Seems there was a power surge in the cloud layer ... You better inform upper management that there may a tornado forming in the cloud!!! If you can't argue with stupid at least have some fun with it.