Nobody knows the problems he's seen. Really. Not even him.

"No-one replied to this email I sent weeks ago pointing out problems."

"We fixed them."

"But if you look at these reports I printed out from our database, you can see that there's lots of similar problems still there." *

"I'm looking at the reports but I can't see where they're saying there's a problem, or what the problem is. They're just numbers without any kind of analysis."

"Weeelll ... you have to know how to read them the right way. Then you can see where the problems are."

"Okay, can you show me a couple of examples, then?"

"What?"

"Show me a couple of the problems these reports are showing, and then I'll work through the rest and see if I can identify the rest of the problems."

"Oh. Oh, these reports. Oh. Well. Um, no. The reports don't actually show the problems. To see the things I think are problems, you have to have too much free time, not enough interest in doing your own job, and a burning desire to find fault in the work of others even though you refuse to understand what it is they're doing or why."

Paraphrasing, of course.

---

* Ted's a big believer in pre-written reports that he can run with the press of a button. Of course he doesn't actually understand the contents of the reports, but he's a firm believer in the power of the printed summary even where the underlying data is known to be incomplete or unreliable. He has an evangelical faith that anything generated from a system as part of an automated process must be free of the human errors - for the sake of argument we'll count Ted as human in this case - that corrupted the data in the first place.

And I thought *I* wasn't a team player...

What a surprise. Ted E. has just taken it upon himself to do exactly the thing we discussed as a team the other week and said we weren't going to do because of technical issues. But sticking with the team decision meant he was actually going to have to not just do something, but actually look at what he was doing, so compared to that trauma you can see why he felt making yet another unplanned and unannounced change to our primary database was the better way to go.

Now he's complaining that the system is throwing up error messages.

Desperate for attention

After a quick rummage through the files, Ted E. loudly exclaims "Oh, look at that!"

No-one bites. We all have real jobs. Technically even me, even if no-one's quite sure what it is, and I'm actually wrestling with a stupidly formatted and security-locked "correct-these-details-and-return" form from one of our myriad idiot suppliers*.

Ted senses the ambivalence and wanders over to the Stress Fiend's desk. "Well, look at this!" he says more loudly, just to make sure he gets someone's attention. "This slipped past me!" 

(All of this can only mean he's found something he's afraid of getting in trouble for and doesn't think he can cover up, so he's trying to show how careful he is by double-checking his own work. Which probably means that it's something irrelevant, because if it was actually important either the Stress Fiend or I would have seen some trace of it by now.)

The only thing less surprising than this is the complete lack of surprise from everyone else in the office. Appearing slightly offended at the lack of reaction, or perhaps simply worried that he's losing his audience, Ted E. produces a piece of paper with flourish.

"Look," he urges the Stress Fiend. "I missed this, somehow."

The Stress Fiend glances at the paper, grunts dismissively and goes on with her work.

Ted returns to his desk and begins sulking. It's a Friday, so this means he'll either leave extra early today, or stay extra late (maybe even until 3.30!) to demonstrate what a martyr he is.

---

* That is, suppliers who are idiots, rather than suppliers of idiots. We're entirely self-sufficient in that respect.

Incompatible minds

We've already been asked to pre-order calendars and diaries for next year, and The Invertebrate reminded us that we'll also need a wall-planner just to mark in leave dates. This caused the Stress Fiend to mention Ted E. losing his temper at her at the start of this year when she threw out last year's planner back in January, and he felt it should be preserved because it was a record of people's planned absences in 2009.

The Invertebrate makes the mistake of trying to understand Ted's point.

"What? He - what? What? But that's just - what??? Sorry. Sorry."

- pause - 

"He WHAT???"

The forty percent solution.

We've been having a lot of trouble lately with a particular vendor: their account rep won't return our calls, they sat on a $200,000 order for a week because they were confused by something that could have been cleared up if they'd actually bothered to ask us, and now we're still struggling to get their damn software to work because they have a licensing system so stupidly cryptic you could be excused for suspecting the involvement of some covert, quasi-military intelligence agency and they still can't give us the right codes to make things work.

So there's a fair bit of ill-feeling towards this company at the moment. In fact nearly everyone who has to deal with them and their product (except the Amazing Toad Man, who wants to lock us into a three-year contract with them, but he lives in a parallel world to the rest of us) would gladly be rid of them both and are starting to explore alternatives.

And then Gimli comes stumping through, fresh from a presentaion by this vendor and their "partner" (a certain hardware vendor who also like to dabble in software sales and invariably messes it up), all fired up on how we should buy yet more stuff from them.

And why?

Because their hardware-selling "partner" owns forty percent of them. 

Why is this a good thing?

They own forty percent!

Will the stuff Gimli thinks we should buy actually do what we want it to do? Do we even need it?

Forty percent, mate! Forty. Per. Cent!

And that's what the argument boils down to. We should buy more stuff from a loathed and unreliable supplier because they're part-owned by another supplier that provides average service on its core business products, and lacklustre service on the stuff Gimli thinks we should be interested in. To make it worse, we'd have to order the stuff we don't need from the vendor we can't stand through the partner; in effect, multiplying their inefficiencies and poor service.

Gimli only makes it out of the room without being stoned because it's late in the day, we're too tired to realise that trying to figure out any logic in this is completely futile ... and we're fresh out of stones.

Evolution: not for everyone.

The Stress Fiend updated our group email signature yesterday, replacing our aging plain text monstrosity that consumed half a page with a leaner, more legible, html version. This combined two of Ted E.'s great, pathological fears: change, and html files. We don't really know why he hates them so much, but he does. It has nothing to do with compatibility, standards, or readability. He just hates them with the kind of visceral loathing normal people reserves for someone hitting a bag of kittens with a hammer.

Ted wrote an email. The new signature came up. He ran straight to The Invertebrate to complain.

"Look what Someone's done!* This is something we should have discussed as a group, instead of just going ahead with it and not telling anyone!"

The Invertebrate: "Actually, I reckon that looks pretty good."

"No, they shouldn't be doing this at all! There's a standard format we're supposed to use, with block capitals and stuff."

"I've been here eleven years, and if there's a standard format, I've never seen anyone use it. And I can tell you no-one is using it now."

Ted changes tack: "It's making our email run slower."**

"Well, I'll tell you what. You open and close a few emails with the old signature and the new one, time how long it takes for them to open, and then we'll see if it's a problem."

So Ted goes off to dutifully open and close emails.

"See? Look how fast this one opens with the old signature! I told you!"

"Dude, you already had it open in the preview pane. That doesn't count."

Crestfallen, Ted returns to opening and closing emails (which sounds wasteful, but actually lifts the net productivity of the team by keeping him engaged in something useless and pointless). Finally he's forced to concede that new signature isn't grinding our email system to a halt, and we get to keep the new signature until he can come up with something else that's wrong with it.

---

* When it's a capital "s" Someone, he always means me. I think it's his idea of being subtle, but now everyone tends to snigger or roll their eyes when he says it. I don't think he's worked out why yet.

** We use Lotus Notes. It doesn't do "slower", only "paralysed with fear and indecision" and, if we're lucky "sudden death".

The General Pointlessness of Ted

Another fine Ted moment. He's been quite prolific lately. One might almost say incontinently so.

Now he's complaining about the fact that The Invertebrate and I often don't start until 9am. Somehow it escapes his highly-selective world view that just because he slinks away at 3 or 4pm(or earlier if people are mean to him and he gets a headache) doesn't mean everyone else packs up and goes home because they can't go on without him. The Invertebrate's hours are a little rubbery (one of the perks of a middle-management position), but I'm routinely here until 5 or later on most days.

On an unrelated note, we have an internal auditor lurking in our area at the moment, and there was a particularly telling moment yesterday after he'd finished grilling The Invertebrate and the Stress Fiend. Ted E. was lurking hopefully, waiting to be included so he could complain about something,  but at the end of the conversation all he got was a quizzical look from the auditor and the rather pointed question: "So what is it you actually do?"

Introducing The Amazing Toad Man

The Amazing Toad Man haunts the upper levels of middle management or, at least, seems to think he does. It's not actually clear from outside his area exactly where he sits on the corporate ladder, and it's entirely possible he sits no higher than The Invertebrate. But he doesn't let that hold him back, or keep him from trying to throw his weight around in other areas' operations. The Amazing Toad Man isn't the name I came up with. I think a friend with the misfortune to work under him came up with that title, or one very similar to it, and the name has stuck in my mind.

The first time I met him he was attempting to pick the lock on the toilet cubicle door while the cubicle was still occupied. I know this because I was the occupant.

"Oh," he said, looking surprised when I opened the door. He gestured at the lock with the bent paperclip he was holding. "It was locked."

Because apparently that somehow made it all perfectly normal.

That's more or less set the tone for my dealings with him ever since. In fact it turned out to be somewhat symbolic, as ever since then he's consistently tried to insert himself into other areas' business without ever thinking to ask ahead of time whether his input is relevant, required or desirable. His specialty is ignoring information and requests for input right up until a deadline occurs, then trying to throw a spanner in the works because he thinks he's been slighted somehow or had his requirements overlooked, and then sulking when the spanner gets thrown back at him because (a) there's no possible room in the deadline to accomodate his last-minute demands, and (b) when you're a minority stakeholder, you don't get to derail the entire process just because you didn't want to talk to anyone earlier when they asked you for input.

He's also presided over an impressive drop in his team's numbers, experience and morale. But it makes his salary budget look good, so in his mind it all balances out.

He's currently plotting and scheming behind our back to lock us into a three-year agreement with a lacklustre supplier everyone else would be happy to move away from. Again, the bulk of our organisation's business with this supplier is ours rather than his, but why let that get in the way of pretending he's the man to see? So expect the Amazing Toad Man to appear again in future when The Invertebrate returns and discovers what's going on.

Semantics: Crisis Mode

"Crisis" (normal person's definition):

matter in dire need of attention; something critical has/is going to fail / blow up / sterilise half the population*; bone^.

"Crisis" (abnormal person's definition. No need for names by this point, is there?):

hoping someone else would answer an email you could have handled three days ago, finally realising no-one has because they all knew you were capable of answering it and it fell into the category of things you're responsible for, and suddenly trying to escalate it as evidence of a major systems failure.

---

* Although there are times, most of them at work, when I have trouble considering this to necessarily be a bad thing.

 

^ Bone: "Bollocks, naff. Not. Very. Good." (Dog Soldiers)

Daring to subvert the paradigm

You're familiar with the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out?  It's not so much a principle here as a way of life, but you get the idea.

Ted E. has boldly gone where no man has gone before, reversed the polarity, and embraced the GOGI principle instead (Garbage Out, Gabage In).  Or, as he prefers to call it without a trace of irony whatsoever, "good customer service".

"I think there must be something wrong with out processes. I keep sending emails out to clients, and they keep sending replies back saying that they don't understand what they're supposed to do. We must be making it too hard for them."

Forest meets trees

Ted E.: "I think there's something wrong with our processes. I send the clients incomplete gibberish in an email, and they keep writing back to say they don't understand."