"Can I bring my canoe?"
I had a middle-aged woman called Margery working for me in a pretty senior role (ie 'should know better') a couple of years ago, and she was probably the most ineffective person we ever hired.

It got to the point when the sensible, professional approach the books recommend ("Let's address one or two areas for development because I think you could go a long way in this organisation....") patently wouldn't work. So in the end I scheduled on the whole team's calendar a DAILY 10-minute kick-off meeting called "Bring your Margery issues to me first thing so I can deal with them all in one go".
HR told me to take it down but I like to think I was a hero to my team - who had quickly grown to HATE her - for 48 hours or so.

How crowning achievement, however, was when she emailed our clients to respond to an invitation to attend a Walkathon for cancer support. Instead of just saying "Yes, I'll come", she actually offered to show up at a certain point on the walk, where it passed near a large lake. And she said for "PR purposes" she would show up in.....her canoe. Because....."it's the same colour as your (product name) branding colour".

My phone rang off the hook that morning. I still have the email and the attached photo.
(Shudders at the memory)
(Thomas_The_Spankengine, Mon 28 Jan 2008, 17:13, Reply)