25 March, 2006

Cow-orker: Let Sleeping Wildebeest Lie

It's strangely quiet. Then a strange snuffling, grunting sound breaks the silence - the Cow-orker has fallen asleep at her desk.

Hah! One mighty snort and she frightens herself awake, looking around frantically to see if anyone noticed!

Hahahahaha...

Presumably she's crashing here from too many sleepless nights at home, waiting for The Spouse to come inside from videotaping the alien flyovers and trying to record her while she's asleep.

I can now back him up on one thing, however - she does snore.

22 March, 2006

Cow-orker: The Truth Is Out There

The Cow-orker was woken again by The Spouse in the small hours of the morning with more video camera antics. This time he was out in the back yard screaming wildly about becoming a millionaire.

Because, you see, he'd just spent the last hour filming UFOs.

And he'd drunk half a carton of beer, which presumably went some way to explaining why the Cow-orker wasn't quite able to share his vision of translating footage of strange lights in the sky near a military airbase into instant wealth.

Yee-hah.

21 March, 2006

Cow-orker: miscellany

"Oh, I didn't tell you about this, did I?"

"Actually you did."

"Oh. Well, I'm going to tell you all about it all over again."

(What she's telling me is the reason behind her decision to switch the brand of recordable CDs she's been using).




No, strangely, I'm not making any progress on this, because some retard keeps interrupting me to talk about everything else that crosses their mind.



"I just sent an email to W***** to set up a meeting. I also asked him blah blah blah..."

Gah! I know you sent him an email, because you cc'ed me. You don't need to read the whole thing aloud to me again!

Cow-orker: plotting & scheming?

Joy. I've just had the fallout from another bout of "moral obligation" hysteria fall in my lap.

I think she's also finally gotten wind of the restructure I proposed for her area and is trying to get rid of me now. She found a position going at another department 100 miles inland and up in mountains and thinks I should apply for it:
"Not sure how you'd get there tho since its at ********* :) but mooving wouldn't be as much of an issue."
Note the mooving, by the way.

Because we're special...

An anouncement from the office of the second-highest ranking official across our entire organisation:

[Our Dept.] ARCHIEVES COMPLAINCE WITH HEWRRs FOR 2006.

It gets better. When I pointed it out to the Cow-orker and said how special it made me feel, she replied with:
Did you know that if you take and AWA now that [the Dept.] could decide that when it expries they can't afford to renegotiate with you and you revert back to Little Johnnie's so called safety net of 5 minimum conditions for employment?
While I'm having some trouble making sense of this, I'm reasonably sure she missed my point entirely.

18 March, 2006

Cow-orker: please vote me off the island

Impending renovations and staffing shortages have seen me moved back to Cow-orker Land, complete with real-live Cow-orker and Perpetual Jabbering Action.

I haven't had to work in close proximity to her since late 2004. God, I'd forgotten how loud she was. I've only been dealing with her when she's been worked up or stressed about something. Rediscovering just how much background noise she generates has been an education, and I think I've already gone deaf in my left ear after only three hours' exposure to the background Cow-orker emanations.

Argh argh argh...

Cow-orker: Mathematics of fear

Recipe for terror = (Cow-orker + wireless headset) = (roaming wall of sound effect + incipient deafness).

09 March, 2006

Cow-orker: Resistance is useless!

My old manager is in damage control mode now, as the Cow-orker descended on one of our support sections and began invoking "moral obligation" and telling them it was essential they begin immediately supporting something which hasn't even been agreed to yet. This is her version of "Shock and Awe".

Her human target apparently responded with something less than blind enthusiasm and total submission to her will. The Cow-orker assumes that he's being deliberately unhelpful in not wanting to embrace a half-arsed solution to a problem that hasn't yet been defined.

"Well I don't see any reason why you can't do this!"

At this point, common sense might suggest to a normal individual that this is because she has no understanding of what the helpdesk actually does. In her case, however, common sense gets shouted down by Cow-orker Sense which dictates that because she once worked in the forerunner to this area for a few months sometime last century (until they couldn't take anymore, the wimps!) she knows exactly what they can or can't do now.

End result: an unhappy, morally indignant and still-fuming Cow-orker, and an aggreived support area wondering what they did to anger the gods this time and whether it's too late to start rolling out the razor wire.

08 March, 2006

Marketing the blame

There's just something deeply satisfying about giving bad news to Marketing people...

No, the Cow-orker isn't heading back there - if that was the case they'd probably treat it as good news, as this is a different branch of Marketing (we have multiple Marketing branches - pity us). Later on, maybe, they'd start to wonder why everything seemed to be a crisis.

For the last few days I've been getting to tell Marketing variations of "Sorry, we can't do anything about the fact you sent out 10,000 advertising brochures without checking any of the facts first. The suppliers don't see how it's their problem, either, and aren't willing to sell stuff to us stuff 15% below cost to get you out of trouble."

The situation is wholely and solely Marketing's fault, and all it would have taken to avoid was a simple "Are these costs still current?" query. Instead I've gotten to witness this wonderful series of fabrications, denials and casting of blame at suppliers as the Marketing manager engages in as much butt-covering as humanly possible before things hit the fan.

And just to make it even funnier, it's also emerged that because they didn't check any details with anyone, they're partly (okay, mostly) responsible for causing potentially hundreds of clients to commit inadvertent software piracy over the last year...

02 March, 2006

Cow-orker: when the lowest common denominator keeps moving.

"You need to clarify this some more, because if it confuses me it's going to confuse the clients. You know how stupid some of them are."

"Fair enough. How are you going at simplifying those multi-page pricelists full of meaingless supplier abbreviations, unnecessary information and confusing jargon that we keep getting queries about?"

"I don't think I need to do that. If our clients aren't smart enough to read what I'm giving them, then they shouldn't be ordering from us."

[Translation: "I don't understand it and I don't want to do it."]

01 March, 2006

Cow-orker: survival tips

A couple of times a day the Cow-orker passes my office on her way to drop some paperwork at Admin. On the way back she's taken to stopping in "for a chat". For "chat" read "interrogation" - her growing paranoia about what I might or might not be working on is eroding her already childlike capacity for dealing with things on a "need to know" basis.

Preliminary results indicate that, if I see her go past, it's actually more productive for me to slip out into the back alleyway and do nothing for ten minutes than it is to remain at my desk, get trapped, and try to continue working while she takes guesses at wthat I'm working on and tells me why it can't possibly work.

Cow-orker: Silly Season continues

Cow-orker: "We can't offer support for this for clients who want to use it from home!"

Me: "You've written it into the terms and conditions on our website that we can."

Cow-orker: "Gotta go!"