I always thought project managers were useless until I got a good one. Then I realized the issue was that most I've dealt with were as useful as this parrot

The key of a good PM is to know their job is to ensure you can do yours. My good PM had that internalized and his only goal was to remove obstacles for us... glorious times

So if I were to say, "I'm playing phone tag with the vendors liaison because all he does is poorly repeat what I ask to others inside the company", my good PM would get on the phone with the vendor and get a list of contacts so I could skip the crappy middle man

Another time I said, the network folks don't agree with the security folks on how to proceed. He would get everyone in the same room and get all ducks in a row, then let me know what the decision was.

If I said, I'm wasting half my day asking for availability to book meetings, he would ask who I needed to talk to and book everything himself