Sometimes it's worth coming to work.

Ted E. Tantrum: he's having an argument with the Stress Fiend about an order he's trying to place and getting confused about, because the website is asking him questions he doesn't understand. The Stress Fiend tells him to leave it alone for the moment, as there's something she needs to check for him before he can proceed.

Ted E. decides the confusion is too  much to bear and proceeds to rip up the order.  "I don't understand any of this, and it's all just getting too complicated!" he declares.

The Invertebrate's eyes pop. The Stress Fiend looks ready to leap the desk and murder him.  I successfully suppress a fit of giggles.

Ted E. shambles out the office, oblivious to the reaction he's caused, complaining as he goes that he has a headache and thinks he'll need to go home soon.

Ugly mirror images

Ted E. takes something to The Invertebrate for discussion.  It takes The Invertebrate a couple of minutes to work out what Ted E. is talking about (it's something the rest of us we were talking about two hours ago - there's that time lag again).

Ted E. outlines his proposition.

The Invertebrate explains what the situation actually is.

Ted E. repeates everything The Invertebrate says, but somehow contrives to get it exactly the opposite way around. "So that's it, isn't it?" he says with some satisfaction, apparently feeling he's proven his point.

"Er, yeah... Except, the other way around."

"What?"

The Invertebrate explains Ted E.'s "point" back to him.

"Oh, of course. That's exactly what I said."

But wait! There's more! Isn't there?

Ted E. is taking a week off. I'm always amused by the fact we pay him more to not be here than we do to have him in the office but, as that also applies to me, it's not something I can read a lot into.  At the team meeting he was asked what he had that we'd need to look after while he was away. He outlines two tasks, one of which we all do (his idea of performing this same task is to look for work he thinks other people should be doing, or find things to blame people for - so no-one really considers this part of Ted's job worth worrying about) and the other takes only 10-20 minutes, although he likes to make out that it's a constant stream of work that keeps him busy all day ... not that these two things are mutually exclusive.

I think The Invertebrate's surprise must have registered, because Ted scrambled for other things. Perhaps unwisely, he latched onto a once-a-month process he guards jealously because it makes him sound like he knows what he's doing.

"Nah, mate, that's okay," The Invertebrate assures him, "the Stress Fiend and I have already talked about that and she'll take care of that."

The Stress Fiend nods, happy to stick the knife in. "It should only take me half an hour.  An hour at most."

(I must admit, I've been looking forward to this team meeting for precisely this reason: it's a legitimate opportunity to make Ted E. tell the entire team how little he actually does, and how little most of it matters).

Master of time and space. Not.

Caution: may contain traces of Ted E. logic.

A client submits a request for some items.  Ted E. reviews the request, takes a guess at which of our technical staff is most likely to carry out the work, and sticks a note on the request asking the tech to ask the client to contact us to confirm that this is the right stuff before we order it.

Except ... except the tech won't actually see the notes from Ted E. until after the items have been ordered, shipped, and are here to be set up for the client.  I know all this, because the tech just rang to check what the client originally ordered, which makes me suspect the answer is "the wrong thing".

And Ted E. knows this is how things work, so I'm not sure how he expected his useless note to achieve anything without resorting to either telepathy or time travel.

Looking for patterns in the madness

I know I shouldn't be looking for logic in this, but Ted E. has proposed a process where we need to reconcile two reports, and look at what items can be reassigned from inventory and what ones need to be ordered in afresh.  So the inventory report is run first, and then compared against a second report showing outstanding requests: of necessity, we want the data in both reports to be current so we can see exactly how much we really need to order.

Ted E. proposes that as soon as the reconciliation is done, we immediately run the inventory report again and use the results (now stripped of anything that can be reassigned and rendered optimally useless), use that as the basis for a reconciliation that could be as much as a month away.

I've tried re-reading his proposal several times and even reading it backwards (sometimes his emails make as much or more sense that way) I can't see how it's possible to interpret his email as suggesting anything else. Even by his standards this makes absolutely no sense.

An impromptu survey

Some of you might have noticed (or not, if you're reading this through an RSS feed) that I've been playing with a Twitter feed to do some mini-updates. That's it over there in the right-hand column - have a quick look.

I'll wait.

...

So could I have a quick show of hands, please - is anyone actually reading them?  I'll probably keep them up in either case, but I'm just curious.

Telling Tales

Ted E. drifts past The Invertebrate's desk and begins whispering conspiratorially.

"I just had a look at the wiki for the section, and Gollum has posted a large technical document there about how to look after a particular service."

"Yeah?"

"I didn't think anyone was supposed to be posting anything there yet. I thought it was still being developed and we weren't supposed to be putting any information there."

"Well we still haven't worked out what's going up on our part, but there's nothing stopping other teams from adding stuff."

"But Gollum doesn't even look after that anymore! What's he doing posting that kind of information."

"Maybe he was the custodian of that document. He used to work in that area, so he probably posted it so that the rest of his old group can have access to it and update it."

It doesn't affect us, it's nothing to do with our team, and there's nothing the Invertebrate could do about it in any case.  Gollum is using the wiki precisely for what it's meant to be used.

"But he put it up where people can read it!"  He's still whispering, in case Gollum walks by and overhears. "I didn't think anyone was supposed to be doing that!"

The Invertebrate shrugs. What else is there to say?

But Ted still isn't mollified. "I'm just saying, is all..." he mutters, retreating to his desk.

I don't know where to start

This is incredible. Ted E. just forwarded through a document for the rest of the team to review, relating to the KPIs I mentioned a few days ago. His email, in essence, says "I don't know what I'm supposed to do, so can everyone please fill in all the blanks so I can submit this and say I've done it?"

It's just ... I don't know where to begin. It's written in what appears to be English, but makes no sense at all. It's the kind of written English you'd get if you taught a basic vocabulary to a chimpanzee, sat it in front of a word-processor, and then proceded to beat the chimpanzee about the head with an iron bar until it sustained brain damage.

Most people, when they don't understand something, can still explain their incomprehension in a way that makes it possible for others to understand what they're not grasping and explain it to them. But Ted E. operates on the next level, where he understands so little that it's actually impossible for him to explain his confusion in terms that would allow anyone to work out what he's even talking about.

If it was deliberate, it would be classed as performance art. But it's not. It's just a jaw-droppingly unintelligible mixture of full-screen screen captures (he must have finally figured out what the "Print Screen" button does), text pasted in from others' emails and documents (still in its original formatting, just to add to the overall surrealism of the reading experience), and some randomly-inserted comments from him that have no obvious connection to the surrounding elements.

I can't even tell where he's suggesting something, where he's asking a question, and where he's provinding something for the sake of "information". I think at some point he's proposing that we simply duplicate the Morass, including all the old and outdated documentation (99% of what's there, at a conservative estimate) ... along with photos of departed staff members? What???

Ted E. in time lapse

Yesterday's team meeting: "This is wrong, I don't like it,and someone needs to fix it the way I think it should be fixed."

Five minutes later, after being asked to explain why it was wrong: "I don't understand this, and it's stupid, and I don't want to talk about it anymore.

This morning: "No-one answered my question about this."

The Invertebrate then tries to explain (again) to Ted E. the difference between FlexLM, local client installations, and using software via a remote terminals. It's hard to tell who's going to have the cerebral haemorrhage first from the strain.

(I keep well clear of it: I lost 45 minutes of my life and 95% of my reserves of patience yesterday explaining to Ted E. yet again why it's fine to write off something that expires after a year, but not something that we need to hang on to indefinitely).

---

* Ted always reverts to calling them dumb terminals, but technically that term can apply to any computer he's using, so the rest of us try to avoid creating ambiguity.

Slappable Clients: the return

Submitted via a web form:

"I have a request to approve for one of my staff.  The software seems to be very expensive and I want to check he has ordered the correct product."

... and that's all he'll tell us. He doesn't identify what area he manages or, more importantly, who the staff member is, or what software the extravagant miscreant wants to order.

Tech support begins at home

"I can't edit this web page. Each time I double-click on it, it opens in my web browser."

"Try right-clicking on it instead of double-clicking."

 - click-click - 

"It still opens in the browser."

 - click-click - click-click - 

"No, right-click."

 - click-click - 

"I don't understand."

"Don't double-click on it. Use the mouse button on the right. Once."

 - click-click - 

"It's broken. Each time I do it brings something up and then it disappears again before I can read it."

 - click-click - 

"Just click on it once."

 - click-click - 

"Once!"

 - click - 

"It's not doing anything."

 - click-click - 

"Now it's opened in the browser again!"

"Did you use the right mouse button?"

"Yes!"

 - click -

"... no. Now it's showing me a list of things. I haven't seen these before. What do I do?"

"You wanted to edit the file, right?"

"Yes."

"So select 'Edit' from the menu it's showing."

"I don't see it."

"..."

"Oh, wait. Now I can edit these files!"

Which, honestly, is the last thing either the Stress Fiend or I wanted him to be able to do, but if The Invertebrate gives him enough rope at least I can hope he'll hang himself.

The game is called "Put up, or shut up"

One of the real sources of pain for this team has been the long-time lack of real KPIs or duty statements. What we've had (and what's made it so hard to manage Ted E.) is that the ones we have had are so toothless and generic that it's impossible to measure any kind of performance against it. Points were awarded, essentially, for turning up at some point during the day and looking at your email. You didn't need to do anything productive with it - just look at it. Even reading it was optional, as Ted E. demonstrated time and again. So one of the many challenges facing The Invertebrate was working out what people should be doing, and how to measure their actual ability. 

Two of the things that Ted E. has been complaining relentlessly about, but contributed nothing towards resolving, have been having to give people information on the phone ("Why can't we just give everyone access to all our systems?"*) and the different information resources used across our area such as wikis and shared documents ("They're just another place to have to look for stuff, and I don't like them and don't know how to use them."**)

Finally it wears The Invertebrate down, and he has a bright idea.

"Tell you what, Ted - those can be your KPIs.  Find out what information the other teams want, whether they want access to our systems, and what we need to do to make it available to them. Then you can look at our part of the wiki and begin working out what needs to go there and how we should organise it."

Ted E., of course, is aghast. He spends the first month after that complaining constantly to the other teams that he's been told to achieve something. Another month passes and he realises that the tasks aren't going to go away if he ignores them, and that for the first time since he started here he's going to undergo a performance review where he'll actually have to demonstrate that he's made a legitimate effort to do something.

To his dismay, he discovers that the other teams don't want direct access to our systems for much the same reasons I don't want them to have access. He's going to have to keep answering half-a-dozen phone calls a day (I made him keep a phone log once for a couple of weeks to quantify how busy he was with the phone - his busiest day was 15 phone calls in 8 hours). So that was a setback for him, but it's given him something new to complain about. 

Much more entertaining was his very late realisation that he hadn't just been asked to look at the organisation's wiki and complain about what he didn't like, but had to suggest a useful way to remedy this. He asked The Invertebrate to explain again to him what he was supposed to do and almost had a coronary when he misunderstood the answer and thought he was being asked to actually write content for other people to read (and complain about). He relaxed visibly when The Invertebrate clarified that all he had to was propose a workable structure.

Then he went wild-eyed and surly when The Invertebrate clarified that writing content was going to be part of his next round of KPIs.

It's not quite the regular beating that Ted E. needs to keep him in line, but it will do for now.

---

* Answer: because it's an unintuitive and unnecessarily complex home-grown system that no-one completely understands; 95% of the information in there isn't relevant to the handful of phone queries Ted E.'s trying to get out of answering; and experience dictates that we can't trust the other teams to use the 5% that is relevant responsibly (or even legally). 

** The Ted Solution here is that we should continue to hide our own information in The Morass, and complain loudly that no-one tells him anything or writes anything down for him where he can find it without thinking.

Human spam

A member of another team drops by to confer with the Stress Fiend about a training course they both went on, and how to access the systems they were trained in.

Visitor: "It's just that since we did the course, I haven't needed to get into our webpages to edit any of them and I've forgotten how we do it."

Stress Fiend: "After the course, you should have received an email with all your login details."

Ted E. has been eavesdropping madly, afraid of missing a chance to show off his vast knowledge of what's going on. He siezes on "email" and "webpages" and inserts himself into the conversation:

"Email? You got an email? There was an email about spam and websites this morning. Or maybe it email spam trying to get you to go to websites. Anyway, there was email."

The Stress Fiend ignores him, but you can feel the Contemptometer climb a couple of notches. The visitor just stares, wondering who this lunatic in a corporate uniform is and how he got inside the building.

Introducing Gollum

There are two team leaders here with the same name, so a couple of us have taken to calling them Gimli and Gollum because that's exactly what they look like (and even sums up how they act).

One of Gollum's team members is departing, and so he decided to have a farewell morning tea for them, and invite people from some of the other teams along.  It was a nice thought, but something was missing...

"By the way, where is Mike, anyway? Shouldn't he be here for his own farewell?"

"Oh, he had a university lecture to go to, but I didn't want to wait for him to get back before breaking out the cake," says Gollum, team leader extraordinaire.