The spirit of cooperation

I've made a partial escape from the Co-worker and am now splitting my time between my old department and working in a similar role at another department across town.

My bosses from the new department to a mailing list:

"Bootcamp poses licensing problems for all of us. Has anyone had constructive advice from Microsoft or resellers about how to approach this?"

My boss from my original department (the Crazy Man), replying to the mailing list:

"As you're probably aware JZ now works here. [Everyone: "Who?"] From his email & practical loading of 2 betas, he now possesses an iMac which can boot into 3 operating systems. VMWare costs much more than the software J's using, even after buying copies of Windows XP, so why would you bother with VMWare just get a Mac, load parallels & Bootcamp & away you go with whatever OS takes your fancy or more than one if you want. Why would you waste money on buying a PC :)"

New department bosses (scratching their heads), to me:

"WTF?"

Argh. She's been filing spam messages. I don't understand. I don't want to understand.

Cow-orker: the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy ... or something

My ex-manager was trying to get an answer (or even a grunt of acknowledgement) from a couple of workmates who are angling for a severance package. After an increasingly exasperating conversation, she gets a response ("Yes we've seen it, no we haven't responded to it") and exits in frustration.

The disgruntled aspiring retirees (both with a long history of shouting at people until they get what they want) begin complaining loudly about having been harassed, humiliated and bullied. The Cow-orker steps in to set the story straight and put them in their place.

Later that day the Cow-orker visits our ex-manager to let her know how things went. "And then I stood up for you and told them that you weren't bullying them, you were being condescending and patronising. Why are you looking at me like that?"

The Cow-orker then runs away to the Crazy Man to complain about our ex-manager's ingratitude. And now she's complaining to me about how our ex-manager is behaving unreasonably by being upset just because she went and threw petrol onto the bonfire of disgruntlement.

Cow-orker: delayed response

Yesterday

Cow-orker: "I don't understand what you did with this in 2004. Do you remember?"
Me: "No, that was two years ago. But I kept the relevant e-mails in the central file."

Today

Cow-orker: "This thing I asked you about yesterday... I don't understand what you did with this in 2004. Did you keep any e-mails?"

With friends like, er, me...

Have persuaded a friend to apply for the Token Human's job (that was formerly the Cow-orker's job before she came back and took my job - if the organisational incest continues at this rate we should see our first crop of cubicle hillbillies any week now).

Anyway. I felt vaguely guilty about encouraging him to put in an application, so I sent him the URL for the old site. This didn't deter him.

Maybe he thinks I was exaggerating.

Muah hah hah...

Cow-orker: Actually slightly worrying

My god. The Spawn is home sick, left in the care of The Spouse. But The Spouse was asleep when the Cow-orker left this morning, and is still asleep now. I know this because the five-year-old Spawn keeps calling its mother to let her know what it's doing, and that Daddy is still sleeping. The Spawn has tried to wake The Spouse up, but keeps getting told to go away and let him sleep.

If the Cow-orker seems concerned that her Spawn is effectively at home alone and unsupervised, she's hiding it remarkably well.

---

Later:
That's a relief (in more ways than one) - she's left early so she can go home to The Spawn.

Cow-orker: taking the Manson Defense

"I'm going to have to ring this client and stir them," says the person who gets mortally offended when clients get unhappy with her, "It's in my nature."

I'm pretty sure serial killers use that defense, too.

Cow-orker: To Boldly Go...

This is a strange and unique experience in pain. The Cow-orker is away for the next couple of days and I'm using the opportunity to tidy up the work instruction documentation for this section.

I'm now charting the dangerous waters of a 70-page document, around of half of which was originally written by me, and all of which has since been subject to extensive Cow-orker updating and reformatting.

God, this is making my head hurt so much. Not just the pidgin English, but the fact that just inserting a line break between paragraphs can cause half the document to spontaneously reformat itself. Clearly her gift for database design extends to word-processing...