They fell off.
28 October, 2005
Loving the smell of napalm in the morning.
The Cow-orker's pot-plant isn't getting any better. My (former) manager prodded a couple of the stalks to see if they were as rubbery as they were starting to look.
They fell off.
They fell off.
26 October, 2005
Random Acts of Cruelty
The Crazy Man has been giving his staff their annual performance reviews (or at least has been reviewing those staff he can't palm off on somebody else). Then it comes time to review an individual that has occasionally filled the role of Backup Cow-orker. The BCO is a very earnest, easily-stressed individual who always seems to be operating several feet out of his depth.
Crazy Man: "Your communication skills need some work. You have a problem with oral communication."
BCO : "What kind of a problem?"
Crazy Man: "I'm not going to tell you, because then you might guess who told me you had a problem."
BCO: "So what can I do?"
Crazy Man: "I think you should talk to people and ask them what your problem is."
And that's the Crazy Man's serious and considered opinion. The BCO is now wandering the corridors of the building looking lost, bewildered, and afraid to talk to people because he's been told he has an unspecified oral communication problem.
Crazy Man: "Your communication skills need some work. You have a problem with oral communication."
BCO : "What kind of a problem?"
Crazy Man: "I'm not going to tell you, because then you might guess who told me you had a problem."
BCO: "So what can I do?"
Crazy Man: "I think you should talk to people and ask them what your problem is."
And that's the Crazy Man's serious and considered opinion. The BCO is now wandering the corridors of the building looking lost, bewildered, and afraid to talk to people because he's been told he has an unspecified oral communication problem.
24 October, 2005
Cow-orker: "I woz 'ere."
Ah, dear. Some database testing takes me into the guts of the long-suffering system we use here, and the Cow-orker's not-so-delicate hoof-prints are all over the place.
One-trick functions have been added and given pride of place in the interface, when a moment's thought would have made them actually useful and versatile ... reference data added with random spelling and punctuation ... inconsistent reference data added, so that the organising principle of the database (organisational units name) is replaced by the popular name for an area that doesn't actually match what it is or where it fits within the organisation ... duplication of reference data because she hasn't checked to see whether something's already there.
She's the Godzilla of databases, honestly.
On the bright side she hasn't changed the colour scheme, so I'm no imminent danger of seared retinas or colour-induced brain siezures. Or maybe I just haven't tested the right report yet ...
One-trick functions have been added and given pride of place in the interface, when a moment's thought would have made them actually useful and versatile ... reference data added with random spelling and punctuation ... inconsistent reference data added, so that the organising principle of the database (organisational units name) is replaced by the popular name for an area that doesn't actually match what it is or where it fits within the organisation ... duplication of reference data because she hasn't checked to see whether something's already there.
She's the Godzilla of databases, honestly.
On the bright side she hasn't changed the colour scheme, so I'm no imminent danger of seared retinas or colour-induced brain siezures. Or maybe I just haven't tested the right report yet ...
19 October, 2005
Slappable Clients: The Return
"Hi, I'd just like to check up on the status of an order."
"Sure. Do you have the requisition number handy?"
"Um... No."
"That's okay. Do you know who it was ordered for?"
"Ummm ... No."
"Oh."
"How about I find out some details and call you back?"
Give the man a cigar.
"Sure. Do you have the requisition number handy?"
"Um... No."
"That's okay. Do you know who it was ordered for?"
"Ummm ... No."
"Oh."
"How about I find out some details and call you back?"
Give the man a cigar.
18 October, 2005
Cow-orker: Scorched Earth Special
Hmm. Doesn't look too bad from back here. If you don't count the lack of foliage, that is...
Looking a little the worse for wear up close, though. And aren't plants supposed to be green, not black?
Scorched Earth goodness.
Sadly there are no "before" shots to show just how little of this plant survived the chemical bombing.
Looking a little the worse for wear up close, though. And aren't plants supposed to be green, not black?
Scorched Earth goodness.
Sadly there are no "before" shots to show just how little of this plant survived the chemical bombing.
17 October, 2005
Cow-orker: In the absence of light...
... the Cow-orker, rather than darkness, prevails. Or so it seems.
The dreaded Forms directory (Enter the Cow-orker, 21/7/2004), where all useful information goes to languish in obscurity when the Cow-orker has anything to do with it, has bloated in my absence. The Cow-orker's request to purchase a gel-filled wrist-rest for her keyboard sits alongside quotes and business cases worth tens of thousands of dollars, because it's easier to dump everything into one location than sort and file it where it belongs and might be of use.
She also still seems to be struggling with the idea of turning on junk-mail filters. Her Inbox just from the last few days is filled with spam, a goodly proportion of it addressed to The Spouse. Maybe she's saving it for him to read, or she's worried that she'll miss out on that one magic e-mail that turns out not to be a con?
And someone appears to have been filing work-emails in the Junk Mail folder rather than simply deleting them outright if they're not needed, or putting them someplace sensible. I don't even think that some of these have been acted on. I don't know whether the Primary or Secondary Cow-orker is the likeliest suspect in this instance, though.
Coincidentally (not!) one of the filing cabinets appears to have suffered a hernia from being crammed full of paper.
The dreaded Forms directory (Enter the Cow-orker, 21/7/2004), where all useful information goes to languish in obscurity when the Cow-orker has anything to do with it, has bloated in my absence. The Cow-orker's request to purchase a gel-filled wrist-rest for her keyboard sits alongside quotes and business cases worth tens of thousands of dollars, because it's easier to dump everything into one location than sort and file it where it belongs and might be of use.
She also still seems to be struggling with the idea of turning on junk-mail filters. Her Inbox just from the last few days is filled with spam, a goodly proportion of it addressed to The Spouse. Maybe she's saving it for him to read, or she's worried that she'll miss out on that one magic e-mail that turns out not to be a con?
And someone appears to have been filing work-emails in the Junk Mail folder rather than simply deleting them outright if they're not needed, or putting them someplace sensible. I don't even think that some of these have been acted on. I don't know whether the Primary or Secondary Cow-orker is the likeliest suspect in this instance, though.
Coincidentally (not!) one of the filing cabinets appears to have suffered a hernia from being crammed full of paper.
Cow-orker: the magic begins again
Haven't got a login to any PCs or the network yet, but that's okay - the Cow-orker didn't change her username or password in all the years I worked with her, and there's no reason to assume she's done so now, and ....
... I'm in!
[Full screen desktop wallpaper depicting The Spawn in all its naked glory]
I'm out!
(Fortunately she hasn't changed the username or password for the generic login, either, nor has she customised the desktop this time around).
The Cow-orker had a thing for pot plants in the office, and whenever one was moved to a new area or out of her direct sight she'd loom over the people nearest it and lecture them on how to take care of it. She'd follow this up with periodic checks to see how her fellow members of the vegetable kingdom were going, lecturing people again if they'd been remiss.
Then she went upstairs to Marketing and left behind the only remaining pot plant she'd still been able to consider hers (because the Marketing Shrew wouldn't let her have enough real estate to fit it in). When her replacement came on board she lectured him and made him promise to water it regularly and take care of it. He kind of did, and despite one or two brown leaves and the occasional bout of wilting when it went a fortnight without water, the plant survived her absence.
(I'd suspect the Cow-orker of slipping down sometimes when no-one was around and watering it, but it's out of character for her to do something inconspicuously).
Then I went away, she came back and so on.
Last week she decided the plant wasn't looking as good as it could have. Thankfully she didn't try talking to it, but she did decide that giving it some fertiliser was a good idea. And perhaps it even was.
What wasn't a good idea was just flinging handfuls of fertiliser powder straight onto the plant so that the powder coated its leaves and stems, and then just leaving it.
It looks like someone's napalmed it. There are only two leaves left, both of which are more brownish-black than green. They were the lucky ones. The rest simply burned black and died, before the poor plant was rushed outside and washed down to remove the rest of the powder before it withered the whole plant. The dead and blackened leaves were trimmed off by the Cow-orker's human workmate, and now the once-healthy pot plant consists of two half-burned leaves and a little over half-a-dozen green, decapitated stalks.
The Cow-orker: Agent Orange for the 21st Century.
... I'm in!
[Full screen desktop wallpaper depicting The Spawn in all its naked glory]
I'm out!
(Fortunately she hasn't changed the username or password for the generic login, either, nor has she customised the desktop this time around).
The Cow-orker had a thing for pot plants in the office, and whenever one was moved to a new area or out of her direct sight she'd loom over the people nearest it and lecture them on how to take care of it. She'd follow this up with periodic checks to see how her fellow members of the vegetable kingdom were going, lecturing people again if they'd been remiss.
Then she went upstairs to Marketing and left behind the only remaining pot plant she'd still been able to consider hers (because the Marketing Shrew wouldn't let her have enough real estate to fit it in). When her replacement came on board she lectured him and made him promise to water it regularly and take care of it. He kind of did, and despite one or two brown leaves and the occasional bout of wilting when it went a fortnight without water, the plant survived her absence.
(I'd suspect the Cow-orker of slipping down sometimes when no-one was around and watering it, but it's out of character for her to do something inconspicuously).
Then I went away, she came back and so on.
Last week she decided the plant wasn't looking as good as it could have. Thankfully she didn't try talking to it, but she did decide that giving it some fertiliser was a good idea. And perhaps it even was.
What wasn't a good idea was just flinging handfuls of fertiliser powder straight onto the plant so that the powder coated its leaves and stems, and then just leaving it.
It looks like someone's napalmed it. There are only two leaves left, both of which are more brownish-black than green. They were the lucky ones. The rest simply burned black and died, before the poor plant was rushed outside and washed down to remove the rest of the powder before it withered the whole plant. The dead and blackened leaves were trimmed off by the Cow-orker's human workmate, and now the once-healthy pot plant consists of two half-burned leaves and a little over half-a-dozen green, decapitated stalks.
The Cow-orker: Agent Orange for the 21st Century.
14 October, 2005
Back to the house of pain
The phone rings. It's my manager from my old, pre-Death Spiral job. The Cow-orker is going on annual leave for a couple of weeks. How do I feel about filling in while she's gone?
(Presumably not as a cow-orker, but I'm willing to get liquored-up at the start of the day and lurch mindlessly and incoherently through the day if that's what they want.)
I take a couple of minutes to think it over. I'll get paid casual rates, the Cow-orker won't be there (but I'll bet she either makes a special visit, or rings every second day to see what's happening), and I'll only have to deal with the Crazy Man and the Secondary Cow-orker ... how bad can it be?
We shall see. I start on Monday.
(Presumably not as a cow-orker, but I'm willing to get liquored-up at the start of the day and lurch mindlessly and incoherently through the day if that's what they want.)
I take a couple of minutes to think it over. I'll get paid casual rates, the Cow-orker won't be there (but I'll bet she either makes a special visit, or rings every second day to see what's happening), and I'll only have to deal with the Crazy Man and the Secondary Cow-orker ... how bad can it be?
We shall see. I start on Monday.
06 October, 2005
Housekeeping
No, that's not what I'm doing with myself at the moment. Well, not entirely.
New posts
There are odds and ends of things (mostly from Project Death Spiral) that for various reasons I didn't get around to posting here. As I retrieve these from old e-mails or wake up screaming in the night when hidden memories bubble to the surface I'll put them here.
Spam
The spam's getting annoying. I could turn on Blogger's 'word verification' feature to (hopefully) counter a lot of the automatic spam Blunt Trauma seems to attract, but it looks like it will be a pain for people wanting to leave legitimate comments (I'd find it annoying if I had to go through it, anyway). If you're not sure what word verification is, have a look here. If you really don't want to go through this step to leave a comment, let me know and I won't enable it.
Otherwise, if no-one cares one way or the other, or I get no answers at all (or if the answers I do get are all spam) then I'll switch this on and save myself the trouble of going in and deleting spam comments.
What am I doing now?
Not a great deal. Fortunately when I left my last job, I had a large enough payout for my unused annual leave (or, as I prefer to think of it, my consolation prize for taking part in Survivor: Cow-orker) that finding work immediately isn't something I need to worry about for a little while yet. So I can take my time looking at what's around, see what I'm interested in (somehow get through the selection process!) ... and probably still end up working for madmen alongside a collection of sociopaths and lunatics.
New posts
There are odds and ends of things (mostly from Project Death Spiral) that for various reasons I didn't get around to posting here. As I retrieve these from old e-mails or wake up screaming in the night when hidden memories bubble to the surface I'll put them here.
Spam
The spam's getting annoying. I could turn on Blogger's 'word verification' feature to (hopefully) counter a lot of the automatic spam Blunt Trauma seems to attract, but it looks like it will be a pain for people wanting to leave legitimate comments (I'd find it annoying if I had to go through it, anyway). If you're not sure what word verification is, have a look here. If you really don't want to go through this step to leave a comment, let me know and I won't enable it.
Otherwise, if no-one cares one way or the other, or I get no answers at all (or if the answers I do get are all spam) then I'll switch this on and save myself the trouble of going in and deleting spam comments.
What am I doing now?
Not a great deal. Fortunately when I left my last job, I had a large enough payout for my unused annual leave (or, as I prefer to think of it, my consolation prize for taking part in Survivor: Cow-orker) that finding work immediately isn't something I need to worry about for a little while yet. So I can take my time looking at what's around, see what I'm interested in (somehow get through the selection process!) ... and probably still end up working for madmen alongside a collection of sociopaths and lunatics.
Death Spiral Retrospective: undefined
PMv1 has returned to take over Death Spiral following the departure of Sluggo, and is having a meeting with me and my minion. To try and cut corners (or as he prefers to think of it, get Death Spiral back to his original vision and still meet an arbitrary deadline he's come up with) he's hit upon a solution that's been available from the start but has consistently been left alone by everyone (himself included) because the results would tell us nothing about what we really need to know, would probably panic management into going for a needlessly expensive and unnecessary quick-fix solution, and would only lead to us having to do everything over again properly if (when!) Death Spiral finally gets the software it needs to proceed.
"Moreover," we point out, foolishly expecting this to be the clincher, "the results wouldn't even be accurate."
"Define 'accurate'."
Oh. That's not good. "Useful. Not wrong. Something on which we could base informed decisions and make valid recommendations."
"Define 'valid'."
Things deteriorate from there, but by the end of the meeting it seems that the official Project Death Spiral line is that project staff asking for accuracy just aren't seeing the big picture, and what would the people who need to use the Death Spiral on an ongoing basis know anyway?
"Moreover," we point out, foolishly expecting this to be the clincher, "the results wouldn't even be accurate."
"Define 'accurate'."
Oh. That's not good. "Useful. Not wrong. Something on which we could base informed decisions and make valid recommendations."
"Define 'valid'."
Things deteriorate from there, but by the end of the meeting it seems that the official Project Death Spiral line is that project staff asking for accuracy just aren't seeing the big picture, and what would the people who need to use the Death Spiral on an ongoing basis know anyway?
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