A friend of ours teaches at a local community college and he has complained about students who make ridiculous demands on his time in the form of requests for letters of recommendation. Either they provide no information or they ask him at the last minute or catch him when he's busy or...

FooBarMe, a recently accepted student at the Haas MBA program and author of Waiting for Picasso was recently asked to write a letter of recommendation for a co-worker. The co-worker thoughtfully made a host of mistakes in requesting the letter and gave FooBarMe excellent material for a helpful post.

If you don't want to make the same mistakes or cause the kind of aggravation regularly experienced by our friend read "How not to get a recommendation letter." Remember: Your recommenders are doing you a favor and writing these letters takes time, an irreplaceable, valuable commodity.

We have tips for writers of letters of recommendation in each category at Accepted.com . For those times when you do everything right and still have a problem with your recommender, check out:
Letter of Recommendation: The You-Write-It-I'll-Sign-It Dilemma