My son, however, is a different story.

This particular client was a screamer. The louder he got the higher people jumped and the further backward they'd bend to try to please him. Nothing seemed to work. He'd scream himself hoarse every day and return the next day freshly gargled to scream some more. One day he was yelling at a co-worker, who stopped him when he paused to take in a breath and asked, "Were you saying something? I can't hear you over all the screaming."

No more yelling for the rest of that project.

The woman who was supposed to be in charge of the organization never followed through on anything. Since she never responded to other people's requests or comments, people started asking me what was going on, how they could get her to actually do something as simple as hold a meeting. (She abruptly canceled the previous meeting upon getting a call from one disgruntled member. When she told me her reason for canceling, I said, "If this is as important to you as you say it is, why would you let one person's opinion cause you to cancel a meeting?")

When passing along a message to this woman – plus board members and other officials – from people who desperately wanted a meeting to discuss major problems they were having, I said something like, "Perhaps it's time they demand a meeting."

The woman ignored every word other than "demand" and blew her top in a private reply to me. She was saccharine sweet in the "reply all" version, thanking me profusely for my dedication to the group and bringing the situation to her attention (she never did anything to address the problem). Privately, she said my "anger" was what was in the way of the group's progress. She said "demand" was a violent and angry word. I view it as proactive. The irony is that I'm probably the least angry person on the planet!

I kept things civil, but replied saying that it was telling that none of the other people copied in on the same e-mail detected any anger whatsoever, so perhaps she needed to look inward to find the real source of that anger. Then I prepared a message to send her in case she got nasty and I needed to block her from e-mailing me.

She's been pretty quiet ever since, other than asking me fore a re-cap of the meeting those people eventually did set up – and she skipped.

I don't care how a big a "star" they are, I do not tolerate that type of behavior. Period.