What are the biggest mistakes a contractor can make in a role...

[DRBO]

...The reason I ask this is that we had a guy here who was acting like a novice though he had been IT for over 15 years...tho only a contractor for a few.
For example
- saying he just wanted the job to get SC clearance
- contantly talking about places he had worked before
- asking others about their extensions and talking about whether his would happen or not...

Other contractors soon started calling him Bill Gates...and well...he only lasted 3 months sadly...

can you think of any other mistakes to be avoided?...

[badgerpig]

these are a few that have seen the demise of previous contractor colleagues

acting like a permy with feet firmly under the boss's table
being constantly late
giving the whole office chicken pox
bringing fleas in to the office
stealing the patio furniture from outside client co office
moaning how bad the client co is to their customers
taking constant sickies always on a monday
watching streamed movies at desk with headphones on laughing loudly at the good bits
going on swinging networking sites on the client co laptop with the client co customer sat next to them
snorting peruvian marching powder in the office toilets
stealing code and process docs from client co
looking in the bin for peoples expenses to see how much theyre on
providing home contact information for every resource on the project to unscrupulous agents

spending too much time on forums......whoops

[Bright Spark]

worst thing is accessing the prod database and running
the truncate table command on a 7million record table .

[alreadypacked]

Doing your nails during conference calls

[Mich the Tester]

worst thing is accessing the prod database and running
the truncate table command on a 7million record table .

not if you can invoice them for repairing the mess

[Moscow Mule]

Releasing umpteen thousand SWIFT messages. Twice. Without a PD indicator.

[Churchill]

Taking a dump on the boardroom table?

Taking a dump on the boardroom table during a board meeting?

[cojak]

Doing your nails during conference calls

Surely you didn't get dropped just for that!

A raised eyebrow maybe, but it's not up there with bring fleas into the office, is it...

[Zippy]

Tell all and sundry about the problems you've had trying to find someone to re-thatch your country cottage.

[singhr]

Taking delivery of a Ferrari in customer's car-park - I kid you not