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.