Unfiltered Story #229472

I work in custom software development as a project manager & product owner. This means I’m working directly with our clients once they’re on-boarded to solve workflow issues and spec out new tasks for requested enhancements or error fixes with our developers.

I’m a woman in a very high level tech position, and as a result often get weird push-back from the male clients I work with. On guy in particular is extra special. I have many head-desking exchanges with him but this one really stands out.

I was explaining how some new auto-calc number fields worked, and used a super simple example to illustrate the function – the following is copy & paste from our email exchange:

Me: “If you enter 2 in the first field, and 3 in the second, the auto calc field will display the total of the two manual entry fields – in this example, that would be 5”

Him: “This doesn’t make sense, 5 seems really arbitrary, why not 7?”

Me: “I’m not sure I understand… 2 + 3 = 5. It cannot equal 7 – can you explain why this is arbitrary please?”

He sends the following reply, CCing in his and my CEO (we work super high-level).

Him: “Look I understand math, you don’t need to explain it to me like a child, especially when you’re wrong. The calculation in the auto calc field is arbitrary, you need to get it fixed”.

I decided not to respond to that last email for a while and just left it.

Later that afternoon client’s CEO replied to that email string with “Please disregard the last email from X, the math is fine in those fields. Sorry. ”

DUH. I honestly don’t know why X remains in that position, this sort of nonsense is a weekly occurrence.