Grown Adults Who Act Like Babies

Sometimes people piss me off. So, I'm working on this project with an internal customer. My job is to talk to the various business units and extract the relevant reporting requirements for their new reporting application as well as identify any new data feed issues and table requirement dependencies, etc. Yeah, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so these are all very reasonable, but also very busy professional people and the application deadlines are all extremely tight. Just getting the requirements alone is a huge chore. Okay fine. So I met their developer last week and when I was introduced I said, "Oh so I hear you used to work at Old Company!" (Old Company being my previous company). He gave me a look like I was completely crazy and said, "I never worked at Old Company", with a sort of inflection and expression that almost said, 'I would never deign to work there'. Okay then. So I've been working very closely with my business contact at this group who is extremely busy, but very helpful to me and is the bottom line in certain decisions. So a requirement came out of a meeting last week to possibly add some enhanced functionality to a parameter input for a report (as in, "wow, it would be great if it could do THIS"). I added a note into the document that I'm writing that said we would have to explore how easy it would be to do and then wrote a subsequent email that said that if it requires extensive engineering (and I believe that it does) then that it should perhaps be an out-of-scope item. Weird Developer Guy (WDG) had sent an email looking for help from other technicians in that group to help with this item. I had mentioned that I had written a program for a prototype a couple of years ago, so that I knew this functionality can work with this tool, but I only knew the report scripting part of it and not the front-end piece as that had been done by someone else. WDG wrote back to say that he would like more detailed info from me about how I did what I did two years ago, with code examples and detail and whatever. In the meantime, my business contact who is managing the project wrote back (to everyone) confirming and backing up my statement that this functionality should be an out-of-scope item. In my opinion, we don't even have the basic report yet -- stuff like this should be looked into as an enhancement patch or second release.

Anyway, so I ended up at 6 PM tonight on an impromptu conference call with the business contact and a D/B guy. And while we're in the call, they threw a couple of questions over the wall to WDG and each time I could hear him whining and bleating about how I don't answer his emails. What?! So, I'm asking, "What emails? The only email I have from him that I haven't answered was the one about the code examples and detail for that enhanced functionality that we're not even going to do. Frankly, I didn't think it was very important" (and I still don't). Business Contact had to interrupt our meeting to find out exactly what WDG was talking about and confirmed that, yep, that was it. He was all pissy and petulant that I hadn't returned his stoopid email about this thing that we've decided isn't even in the scope of the project. Not to mention that it would take me a while to dig up the information he's looking for as it is on a server and environment with a customer that I'm not even working with anymore. I'm not even sure if I have still have access to it and if I do, it's still going to take some searching. Sheesh! This is a grown adult working as a contractor for a very corporate business group, at a very corporate company in the middle of Boston. Are you kidding me? Business Contact told me not to pay any attention to him. I just don't have time for this crap! GAH.