Go on, guess who...

That data corruption that Ted E. was so quick to shift the blame to me for? It emerged very quietly at a team meeting a couple of weeks later that someone hadn't quite grasped that when they were looking at tabular reports in a database, they were actually looking at live data ... and that blithely deleting the lines they weren't interested in, to make the report easier for them to read, might have unintended consequences.

Of course it also meant that Ted E. could then claim the reports had been fine-tuned, because they were no longer showing data he considered irrelevant.

Ted E. rides again

Oh, Ted E., you weasel ... there's been some database corruption and I can hear him, over in the corner talking to the database developer, telling her how "other people" (and he helpfully goes on to identify me specifically) use the database tables to search for and extract data that isn't accessible through the default reports are available (or, as he puts it, I "go in and change the design of the database").

"But I only ever use the reports you've given us, because I know that it's dangerous to look at the tables."

Yes, Ted E., data can be corrupted simply by looking at it. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time you ask me to find information for you that isn't available to you through the safe reports.

Fortunately, the database developer actually understands her work and, moreover, recognises when Ted E. is simply trying to pre-emptively pass blame on to someone else when it isn't even clear that there's anything to blame anyone for in the first place.

The horror... the horror

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised what my job here is. It's to fix up the things so broken and horrible that the people who actually have the information that would let them make sense of it all, don't want anything to do with it. Without, naturally, the benefit of knowing any of the things they know about the matter at hand...

It seems so obvious in hindsight, but it's taken three different tasks arriving at the same time to make me see it in that light.

From Russia, with Love?

I could try to summarise the last few months: the dramas with a workmate I shall henceforth dub The Stress Fiend, the ongoing joy of working with Ted E., strange things suppliers do that they think are helpful (a tip - if you've got a Hawaiian shirt, try hanging around random loading bays and see how much free stuff you can score), and numerous other hijinx associated with life in a poorly-funded organisation with neglected infrastructure, eccentric hiring practices, and a fondness for inventing problems before they happen while not worrying about addressing real problems before they bite...

But that's a lot of effort. So instead I'll ease back into things by making fun of the spam I've received lately.

Alena from Russia writes in "Surprise from Russia":

I am from Russia. I am 30 years. Recently I with girlfriend have climbed in the Internet and have seen this site.

Presumably climbing the internet is how people describe web-surfing in countries where it's too cold to actually surf. In fact the cold air would also explain certain aspects of the photos Alena attached to her email. Alternatively people find this site much more stimulating than I could have imagined, which makes me wonder if I should tone down my writing style somewhat.

I was on different sites, but it has liked me also I has decided to write.

Alena can has chezburger?

Ekaterina, also from Russia, writes in "I think you'll like it!":

Hello!!! My name is Ekaterina, I a 25 years old. I live in country Russia , in Chistopol city.

Never heard of Chistopol? Neither had I, but I looked it up, it's real (who says spam can't be educational?), and I can understand why Ekaterina would want to get out of there. Ekaterina has never contacted me again, so presumably these pictures of Vladimir Putin have convinced her that she needn't look abroad to find true love after all.

The Lonely Woman from Russia Anna (I kid you not, that's how she refers to herself throughout) writes in an email of the same name:

I understand that you now are surprised that to you this letter has come.

Not as surprised as I might have been if Alena and Ekaterina hadn't beaten you to the punch. These days I'm surprised when I don't get emails from Russia with love (or, at least, negotiable affection). Interestingly, Anna tells me that in Russia there are 30,000,000 women living without men. Considering that's several million more women than there are people living in Australia, that's a difficult number to conceptualise. Frankly, I'm not sure why Russia just doesn't clone Vladimir 30,000,000 times and be done with it.

Alina, also from - surprise - Russia, writes to me with "Let's have communication", although the tone of her email makes me wonder whether "communication" isn't a euphemism:

I want to get acquainted with you. I will be very glad if we will have fine dialogue ... If you wish to have dialogue with me then write to me and I shall be glad to have dialogue with you.

And, I have to admit, I was almost tempted, because who doesn't mind a good bit of dialogue now and then? But in the photos she attached (sitting at a table in a restaurant), it looks like Jack Bauer sitting at a table behind her and I don't believe in that kind of coincidence, especially given that Bauer now operates with the blessing of at least one member of the American Supreme Court. Who wants to take that kind of risk?

Meanwhile, in the attention-getting stakes:

The curiously-named u66daji fights it out with ashorty but, as attention-grabbers go, his exhortation that I should "type to clank flatulence" really isn't an incentive to open his/her message, and even after doing so I'm not quite sure what he/she was trying to sell me. ashorty's more aggressive approach ("So listen lapdog!") is, frankly, taking the hard sell to ridiculous extremes and was equally incoherent.

I'm thinking "42" might be the way to go...

"I need you to redraft this email that your minion wrote. I want it to say something different."

"Okay. What would you like it to say?"

"Something more meaningful that we can use as standard response to queries about this in future."

"Okay, but what would you like it to say?"

"Something better. Something people can understand."

"About what?"

"What your minion wrote. But different. Make it universally applicable. And concise."

"Universally applicable but concise."

"Exactly. And unambiguous, too."

Uh-huh.

So far, so good...

... to quote the captain of the Titanic.

One week down and my role as team leader has caused neither open revolt amongst my minions (although I'm keeping a close eye on Ted E.) nor catastrophic systems failure amongst the things I'm supposed to be looking after.

Or, at least, amongst the things I think I'm supposed to be looking after. Despite having several weeks where we could conduct a formal handover process, everything the outgoing manager felt I needed to know was condensed into a one-hour session where I was shown two large white folders full of emails and printouts, and proudly told "In one day's time, all this will be yours." The actual details of what I'm meant to be doing through the course of the day (or, indeed, how I'm meant to be doing it) remain vague. Given that I'm not being paid any more for supervising three minions, I'm assuming that what I'm meant to be doing is limited to "everything except anything that might mean having to pay you extra".

Ted E. has been in good form, however, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn his job satisfaction has taken a bit of a hit.

• First of all he tried to convince the outgoing manager that because he was taking over a once-a-week task that our two-days-a-week casual does, he should be able to offload most of his full-time duties onto someone else. Perhaps surprisingly, this didn't work.
  
  
• After all the stress and anguish of an office refurbishment and relocation of furniture (the outgoing manager had the well-intentioned if naive idea that everyone should be consulted about the new cube farm), we were told we needed to fit another desk in the area. Floor plans were consulted, common sense was referred to (no, really), and it was decided that Ted E.'s vast desk would need to be replaced with a normal-sized one to allow another person to sit at his end of our enclosure. A full week later, when final arrangements are being made, Ted E. announces that he's not in favour of this and tries to veto the desk-swap through sheer stubborness. Our casual, sick of endless discussions about the refurbishment, nearly had to be restrained from leaping across the intervening space and throttling him.
  In the end it was agreed that as Ted E. currently occupies twice as much floor space as anyone else, he has to be the one to lose some ground (which is exactly the same reasoning that led to the idea being proposed in the first place, but it was important to have a one hour meeting to reach this point again). Of course Ted E. had already wandered off to afternoon tea by this point (it's his usual strategy when he doesn't get his way in a meeting - slip away "to answer the phone", and then slip away a little further, etc.) so as far as he knows the idea is for us to work out a viable alternative to him being reduced to the same workspace as the rest of us. But Ted E. is the only one with an interest in doing this, and he hasn't come up with anything, so come next Monday morning he's in for an unwelcome surprise that will probably send him home early with a headache.
  
  
• "I can't find these files on the server. Where are they?"
  "Stored under the relevant supplier. Everything was really inconsistent before."
  "I don't know who the supplier is."
  [I tell him].
  "I'm just going to rename the folder so I can find this again."
  "No! We're not renaming stuff. That's how things got into a mess in the first place."
  "Can I just rename it a little bit, then, so I can recognise it next time?"
  
  
• "There's an email just come in to the shared mailbox. It's relevant to some other emails that are in there." Subtext: "I've been waiting for someone else to deal with them, and now I'm waiting for someone else to deal with this one. But I'm not going to say that out loud."
  

"Uh, is this thing on?"

Sad to say (well, only in the most masochistic, don't-want-to-disappoint-what-remains-of-my-audience kind of way) that things have been relatively sane and dull at work lately. There's only been the standard, everyday havoc going on around me and very little of the malevolent lunacy that seems to stalk me from workplace to workplace.

Of course, Ted E. was away for six weeks, which accounts for part of it...

And the more volatile of our casuals also declared about a month or so ago that she was leaving and never coming back. (Thus far she's kept her word, but her memory remains in the form of drunken dinosaur-like footprints throughout our database. Any time something occurs that makes no sense, enrages the clients, and breaks something, we can usually find her user ID stamped somewhere on the records).

So, while not exactly a Golden Age (don't make me rant about being trapped in a shared office the size of a glorified broom cupboard while half a dozen people pile in to have a meeting with my cell-mate) it's been a relatively peaceful and dull time in the old cube farm. In a grinding, shifting-goalposts/too-many-demands/not-enough-staff way, at least.

But, fear not, for good news is at hand!

It's all a bit subject to negotiation at the moment (and negotiation at my workplace tends to be conducted along the lines of upper management gloating in Bond-villain fashion while dangling you over an elaborate deathtrap), but ...

I may end up managing Ted E. (and a couple of other minions) for the rest of the year.

Accounting, Ted E.-style

One of the sources of stress for my manager over recent months has been the wild fluctuations in the money available in our sections accounts. Part of this was due to the money laundering that was taking place, and upper management helping themselves to our funds when they needed a little extra for other projects elsewhere, but both practices were more or less brought under control when upper management discovered they'd been found out.

But the fluctuations continued, and money continued to inexplicably drain away. Until yesterday...

We're looking at a new function in our tracking and purchasing system. Ted E. looks over my shoulder and points to an account number.

"That's wrong. It always keeps coming up with that number when I'm doing the accounts, and it's wrong."

Manager and 2iC look at each other. "Uh, that's our account name, Ted. It's been that for nearly eighteen months now."

"Oh, really? I've just been changing it so the money goes to these other accounts where I think it belongs."

"For eighteen months?"

"Well nobody told me..."

"Eighteen months, Ted! You thought there was a bug in the system for eighteen months and didn't say anything?"

"Welll ... it was just easier to do it this way and not tell anyone that I was siphoning money off to other accounts..."

The Learning Cliff

Manager (in search of Ted E.): "Where is he? Has he gone home already?"

Me: "Well it is ten past three..."

Manager looks at me, trying to tell if I'm joking.

"Did he tell anyone he was planning to leave early?"

Remaining workmate and I confer briefly. "Yes ... yes, he did. At about quarter to three."

"Oh. I needed to ask him about something. There's also an e-mail I needed to talk to the two of you about, following on from what we were discussing earlier ... only now I can't find it."

"It's been filed!" I pronounce ominously. Ted E. has taken to filing e-mails, using a hidden formula known only to himself and Dan Brown.

"No, it hasn't," says our manager, "That's what I thought, too, but I tried a global search and it didn't turn up."

The global search apparently doesn't encompass the "deleted" folder, because that's where I find it a few minutes later.

"Found it," I announce cheerfully.

"Where? No, don't tell me." There's a pinched look of pain on my manager's face that I haven't seen before, but which is oddly familiar from the Cow-orker workplace. "I think I need to talk to Ted E. about this in the morning."

My manager hasn't so much hit the Ted E. learning curve as smacked straight into the Ted E. cliff-face.

A pointy-haired moment

Argh.

Manager: "When I told you to contact these people, I meant 'contact these people, plus another unspecified group'. Did you read my mind, and have you heard from the unspecified group yet?"

Me: "Er... no."

Manager: "Then I think you need to get on with that urgently."

In an ideal world.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you're going to insist other parts of the organisation turn over all their activities in a particular area to your management, that you'd make sure beforehand that if you didn't already have the means of managing that task properly, you acquired it pretty damned quickly and made sure you were able to deliver on what you were promising.

You'd think...

Ted E., Man of Action

The two beliefs that drive Ted E. at work are: give the client what they want, and act immediately.

Unfortunately this tends to fall down tragically when:

1. what the client wants isn't what they need or are entitled to;
2. Ted E. doesn't understand what the client wants;
3. Ted E. doesn't actually read the client's email and acts immediately to give them what he thinks they want.

Hi-jinx ensue.

Thinking outside the box ... way outside...

Oh dear. Ted E. has been "thinking outside the box" in a bid to get out of doing work that requires engaging brain cells.

"I know doing it this way is more secure and more accurate, but can't we go for convenience instead so I don't have to spend twenty seconds looking up a database to verify confidential information?"

Data consistency is for lesser beings...

Argh. I'm glad that's over with for now.

I've just finished (I think) doing some data cleanup to fix the problem of half-a-dozen products being erroneously labeled with around 30-odd different combinations. That just sounds painful, rather than difficult, so throw in the fact that the software vendor restructured its licensing and sales model twice over that period and youll start to get an idea of how "interesting" the task turned out to be.

And then consider that the next time Ted E. goes into the database, he'll look at what I've done, decide it's too hard to understand and that consistency of data within a database is only a guideline (and a loose one at that), and begin creating new and wonderful product descriptions all over again...

Holy Wars: the Innate Superiority of The Mac

Let me just preface this by saying first that I really don't care what type of computer people use as long as it gets the job done. However...

A co-worker uses a Mac. Up until yesterday he also had to use a PC, because while his Mac could run the Microsoft Access application critical to much of our work (provided he was running a virtual Windows machine), it couldn't connect to the Oracle database that sat behind the Access front-end.

So he ran both a PC and a Mac to get around this, until yesterday when he, a tech, and a senior tech spent two hours trying to establish a connection to a database. Eventually it succeeded, but at a conservative estimate the exercise cost somewhere in the vicinity of $200 to $300. That's purely in terms of wages, and doesn't take into account the things they didn't do during that time because they were concentrating on getting one Mac to duplicate the functions of an existing Windows machine.

All good now, though? Well, no, because now he has to get Lotus Notes working properly under the virtual Windows machine, because otherwise he has to deal with the Lotus web interface and its various idiosyncrasies. But at least now he's down to using only one computer (most of the time), and after another couple of hundred dollars in salaries are consumed, he might be able to do everything he wants on his Mac.

By running all the critical systems through a virtual Windows machine.

Stupidity and The War On Me

I believe I may have to kill Ted E. shortly. The system we use here is set up with a product-prices hierarchy - that is, the database (you knew this was going to involve databases at some point, didn't you?) contains a record for a particular product, with sub-records that reflect the different models under which it can be ordered, e.g. single user, 5-user etc.

I discovered a couple of weeks back that there was a particular product suite that was proving difficult to track because Ted E. had created it as a subset of another product from the same company (a quick analogy would be listing Microsoft Office as being a subset of Microsoft Word). I tried to convince him not to do this because it wasn't just contrary to how the database is supposed to work, it's just plain wrong. But he didn't want to change it, because that requires a lot messing about to update all the records.

So I create new product entires in the database to match what the orders should be, so he can use it for future reference (he wasn't interested in trying to understand the way the products were sold, so I had to set them up myself - no big problem, because at least that way I know they're done right).

Now I find the ignorant bugger is still doing it, "because that's how I did it last time". In other words, it's more convenient for him if he keeps entering incorrect data rather than apply a little brain power - not a lot, just selecting something from a drop-down list - and do it right.

And I know when I take this to him shortly and explain again what's gone wrong, two things will happen:

• he'll react with injured innocence and repeat that he's just ordering it how it's always been ordered, and if we get the right stuff in the end, what's the harm?
• my blood pressure will soar, and I'll be fighting the urge to break office furniture over his head.

Cow-orker: the energizer bunny of stupidity

Cow-orker to an e-mail list reaching a dozen or so separate organisations:

"Hi everyone. We've received some documents under a non-disclosure agreement that we're concerned about. What do you think?"

And, sure enough, two of the three documents attached to the e-mail are clearly marked as being under NDA, not for circulation outside of vendor-controlled forums, etc.

This comes only a couple of months after she placed confidential vendor information on a publicly-accessible website because it was easier than relaying the information directly to the individuals affected by it.

The Crazy Man Revisited

Ten days ago a call went out on a closed, inter-organisational e-mail list asking for participants in a trial programme. Over the next day or two, a small handful volunteered to be guinea-pigs.

This morning the Crazy Man finally sends through his response. "Sorry for the late reply," he begins, "but I'm in a conference in Sydney and they're having trouble getting the wireless network connected..."

And the thing is - I'm not sure whether this is just a lame excuse (because even he can't pull off ten days of consecutive conference time), or if what he's making a Freudian slip and telling everyone he only replied at all because he isn't able to web-surf right now...

Cow-orker: you can lead a cow-orker to water ...

... but it's still illegal to drown them.*

"I want to send an e-mail to everyone saying they need to stop using this product and switch to products that I say are okay!"

"Wouldn't you rather just tell them they need to consider alternatives to the current product, and not get flamed by the users?"

"Um ... no, I don't think so. My way is better."

---

* From the archives.

So, yeah... I'm back.

The World of Warcraft ate my life. Sorry. Now back to the other things that eat my life, but are far less fun and can't be resolved by hitting them with a broadsword (except on a very temporary basis).