temperamental
A balky person is not willing to work with or be helpful to other people:
The young parents were growing frustrated trying to get their balky toddler to go to bed.
The police used clever tactics to get the baulky witness to testify.
Synonymawkward
Tiger Woods was the only player in the field not to have a bogey, but a baulky putter meant only three birdies.
Some of the lawmaker's colleagues were balky about voting for the bill.
SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases Machines - not functioning
act up
blooey
break down
broken
brokenness
brownout
cut something out
downtime
fail
flat
malfunction
outage
seize
seize up
short circuit
shot
shudder
shut
shut (something) down
whack
You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:
Unhelpful and Uncooperative