06 December, 2005

Power struggles

The Crazy Man doesn't like being made to do any work or produce results. On the other hand he doesn't like it when people don't follow rules, and will usually pursue rule-breaking to the exclusion of all else. Another manager doesn't like following any rules except his own and is something of a control freak. They clash, because neither has the capacity to actually approach the point of contention with anything less than a demand for the other side's complete and unconditional surrender, and promise never to do anything again.

The Crazy Man continues trying (with some justification) to insert himself into some of the other manager's business processes. The other manager tries to retaliate by appropriating all the Crazy Man's related processes, but fails because it's hard for the head of Technical Support to claim with any justification that he should also control Purchasing. The Crazy Man wins and, being the Crazy Man, gloats.

The other manager strikes back by forcibly migrating the Crazy Man and all his staff from their mixture of Eudora, Netscape Mail and other random mail clients to Outlook/Exchange. Most of his admin stuff are just unhappy because it's something new and they don't deal well with "new"; others are unhappy because they're convinced that without their carefully-ordered, decade-old Eudora mailboxes they'll never be able to find any mail ever again. Great anguish ensues.

Moral: nobody wins a war.