Etiquette

The Pet Tech is congratulating himself and his team on having successfully resolved something that's been a bugbear for nearly a year now, loudly expressing his amazement at the organisation's lack of communication skills and impressing upon everyone that if his team had known about this problem from the start much unnecessary work could have been avoided.

He's not being particularly obnoxious about it (yet), but this does raise an interesting point of etiquette. Is it considered more polite to:

• appear needlessly quarrelsome now by reminding him that that he and his team were aware of the problem, involved in meetings to deal with it, and advised of the workaround that's been in place for a year; or,
• let him keep going until he does get obnoxious about it, and then forward him the email chain showing he'd been told about it ages ago, particpated in meetings in how best to work around the problem, and then did nothing?

It's like blood sports in a cubicle

Round One

"I still need an answer to those two questions I asked."

"Which questions were those?"

"The ones about the statuses?"

"What statuses? I've been away for a couple of days, remem -"

"Because I really want to know the answers, because I don't know what the answer is."

"Okay, but you'll need to let me know what the ques -"

"And I really want to know. Because I don't know what to tell people and I want to tell them exactly what the statuses are."

Eventually The Invertebrate manages to get Ted to tell him what questions he meant.

Round Two

"You'd probably have to talk to HR to get them to - "

"Because I don't know."

"To HR. They'll be - "

"I keep getting phone calls about this* and I don't know what to tell people."^

"..."

"What? HR? I don't know who to talk to there. Can't you tell me the answer? Because I need to know exactly what to tell people."

"Well I don't actually know because we don't look - "

"Because I don't know. And I really need to know, and no-one's ever been able to tell me. I need a list."

"You just call the general number and - "

"Someone should write a list. I need a list. Because I don't know the answer and I keep getting asked**. Why can't someone in our division tell me?"

"We're not HR. You might be able to - "

"Why doesn't our help desk have a list of what these statuses are?"

"Because it's a helpdesk tool, not the HR system."

"But it has statuses."

"But it's not the same system."

"It has to be - some of the statuses have the same name. And users are recorded in both systems. I'll just talk to the guys who look after the helpdesk."

"They're different systems. That's why HR - "

"I'll talk to the helpdesk. I want to know exactly what the statuses are and what they mean."

"They won't - "

"Because I need to know, you know."

Another confused and ear-bleedingly painful conversation takes place as the Invertebrate engages in another skirmish in the long, drawn-out war to convince Ted E. that the dodgy, error-ridden helpdesk software used by a couple of hundred IT staff isn't the same as the dodgy, error-ridden HR systems managing a few thousand employees and twenty-odd thousand clients^^.

Round Three

"Right... so these statuses are set in the HR system?"

"Yes."

"And that's not the same as the heldesk system?"

"Yes!"

There's  a pause. Ted E. very clearly doesn't believe The Invertebrate is telling the truth about this, but The Invertebrate is looking a bit wild-eyed by this point and Ted decides it's safer to humour him.

"So is there someone in our division I can talk to who can give me a list of the HR statuses I need to know about?"

"HR have a general - "

"I want to know. I need to know exactly what's on the list. What team looks after this?"

(No, I don't know why he's so averse to just calling HR directly. I figure it's either that he doesn't believe they actually exist - and there's certainly empirical evidence to suggest that - or, more likely, he's afraid they might ask who he is and why are we still paying you, anyway?)

The Invertebrate capitulates and tells Ted which team may be able to give him the list, presumably to forestall Ted asking him to do it for him.

Endgame

Ted E. then doesn't call the other team; instead he emails the client back to tell them everything he'd just been told wasn't the case, and leaves them just as helpless and infinitely more confused than they were before he started "helping" them.

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* Lies!

^ Damned lies!

** Any more damned lies and they'd be morphing into statistics.

^^ The HR systems are even more dodgy and error-ridden than the helpdesk software, but it hurts more when it fails so more effort is made to keep it's life support functioning.

Low entry standards

Well of course if you give us incorrect information and ask the techs to install something on the wrong computer it won't be on the computer you really wanted it on. 

Why are you surprised?

This is why we have "Technology" in our division name, not "Magic and Applied Mind-Reading".

What's in a name?

One of the other teams we work closely with has their own Ted, in more ways than one. They share the same real name, and similar work practices (i.e. pass it on to someone else as fast as humanly possible).

The other Ted has this habit he can't seem to shake, where he'll stick his head over the partition wall to ask the real Ted a question. The real Ted then denies any knowledge of the answer, washes his hands of any involvement in the matter, and then passes Pretend Ted on to someone else. It usually falls to me (not, surprisingly, because Ted E. passes me the buck - he doesn't actually tell Pretend Ted who he should talk to for an answer, just "not me") because I seem to be the only person actually present the majority of the time.

We've gone through this several times already this week, and now we've just gone through it yet again. Pretend Ted continues to seek advice from Original Ted, despite every single experience telling him that OT won't actually possess an answer, and continues to ignore me despite the fact I've given him every single answer he's come looking for.

There must just be something about their name.

Not technically-minded

Fortunately I have a roadtrip on Friday, because Ted E. is gearing up to make this week a long one. Not only is he treating the Stress Fiend's continued absence as a calculated affront, but he's struggling once more with the concept that while he chooses to start at 8am while The Invertebrate and I start at 9, this doesn't actually mean he works more hours in a day than we do or that everything else grinds to a halt in his absence and we just put our feet up once he leaves.

It's an arrangement that's entirely his choice, but the amount of badly-concealed resentment he harbours about occasionally being the only person here for that first hour of the day is bewildering. Or would be, in a normal person. In Ted it's just another one of those things.

One of those oh-so-many things...

On the other hand, at least he's still capable of providing some entertainment at his own expense, as he desmonstrated in his latest exchange with a client. Bear in mind the following as you read this:

1. we work in an IT environment. Theoretically, even the administrative staff should have at least some knowledge of computers and technology beyond what a half-smart parrot can pick up from rote learning;
2. a large part of our job is software procurement (or, as Ted insists on calling it, "procruement") so there's also some assumption that we know just a little bit about software;
   
3. he's been in this unit for several years now. Again, theoretically, this would give a normal person ample time to acquire some rudimentary knowledge about software and IT concepts;
4. clients place the majority of their orders through a web-based interface, generating the small amount of legitimate work that Ted E. actually does. In other words, you wouldn't call it's significance to his job minor.
   

"Oh, I don't really know about anything technical ... You're using IE8? I don't know that one - what browser and version is it? Does it run under Windows? ... What browswer am I using? Oh, I don't know. I just click on the button and it starts my Internet Explorer. I don't know what kind it is. I only use what they give me."

I dearly want to see how his job was originally advertised - or what it was even supposed to be - and what the selection criteria were.

Still not dead.

There's been a particular task - and I'm sure I've mentioned this previously - that my "team"* has been doing for Gollum and his predecessors for the last couple of years, and which I've been trying to offload from us because it's not our role, we're the worst-positioned team to be trying to look after this stuff, and Ted E. has been using it for a long time to mask how little he actually does, stretching a 60-minute, once-a-week task into something that consumes all his attention for two to three days at a time...

... although, now I come to think of it, maybe it quite legitimately takes him that long to do something a normal person can do in under an hour...

Anyway.

Needless to say, Ted E. has fought tooth and nail to prevent having this task taken from him. Earlier this year he tried to demonstrate to The Invertebrate how challenging the work was, and why it took him so long to do it. The Invertebrate looked at it carefully, then looked at what we're actually supposed to be doing, and announced "This is crap! Why are we doing this when Gollum's team are supposed to be looking after this stuff?" At which point Ted E. beat a hasty retreat behind a smokescreen of assurances that it was all quite easy to do, really, and not at all time-consuming and that he was really very happy to keep on with it and please don't take my easy work away from me and make me do real stuff like everyone else has to.

Now, though, Ted has become bored with it (maybe because it's now coming through as a regular weekly occurrence rather than something intermittent, and people have started to call him on his bluff that he does it punctually every week - it stops being a fun way of killing time once peple start expecting you to follow up on your claims) and is starting to whinge about having to do it.

The Invertebrate, who I suspect suffers mild ADD because he seems oblivious to the previous conversations about this, is once again fired-up to push the work back onto Gollum and Co. and has tabled it for discussion at our next team meeting. Given that Ted E. is the only one who's ever wanted to retain this task, the outcome would seem like a bit of a no-brainer ... except sooner or later Ted's going to realise that if he suddenly clears up two days in his schedule he's going to be expected to fill it with something at least tenuously work-related.

The upcoming backflips are sure to be entertaining.

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* Anytime I talk about us as a team I can practically hear the quotation marks slipping into place on either side of the word, so I may as well set them down in black and white.