Glimmerings of sentience?

Ted's asked me to read an email he sent to a client yesterday to see if I'm happy with it. Understandably this set alarm bells ringing, not least because he's never given a damn about my opinion on anything before now.

It actually manages to be worse than I suspected.

It's a mixture of a hand-washing confession of ignorance and simultaneous attempt to provide answers based on a loose keyword search in Google (have I mentioned before that he doesn't know how to actually use Google or, indeed, any kind of search tool?), culminating in a half-hearted plea for more information.

Each part by itself isn't that bad.  It's not great, either, and is written in Ted's unique brand of Pidgin English, the very existence of which is an achievement in itself as English is nominally his first - and only - language. But I certainly don't have a problem with telling clients we don't know the answer and need some more information from them before we can proceed. I wish he'd do it more often instead of making stuff up and then leaving it to someone else to clean up the mess.

Okay, perhaps I was being overly charitable: the middle part, the random web search for things he thinks might be useful to the client?

It's heroically bad. It's on par with the algorithm Amazon use for their recommendations ("We see you bought a copy of the graphic novel From Hell. Would you like a pair of Wolverine underpants to go with that?"), but even that doesn't convey the scale of how truly bad it is.

Which is: it's so bad that even Ted suspects he's not making any sense.

"I like to watch..."

Ted E.'s on an energy-efficiency kick, courtesy of a council brochure dropped into his letterbox offering to do an energy-efficiency check of his house.

"My neighbours are so wasteful with their lights. Every time I look into their place at night they've got all the lights on, in all the rooms. Front rooms, back rooms, everywhere."

I'll just leave you to think about that statement for a moment.  It doesn't get any less creepy.

Sometimes this place makes me laugh

Redneck Tech: "I'm getting a dog. A rottweiler."

Invertebrate: "You're nuts."

"Why?"

"Because you've got small kids, and Rottweilers like eating people."

"Any animal can be a danger to small kids. You just have to train them properly."

"They eat adults, too."

"I know! Isn't that cool?"

"What are you going to do if it turns on you or the kids?"

"I've got plenty of guns. It won't be a problem."  Pause.  "And it's not like it would be the first time, anyway."

I weep, for the day is still young

Oh, for...  Everything below happened within the first 45 minutes of me arriving at the office.

*****

Ted's just discovered something that's been a basic part of one our primary systems for the last two and a half years. So it's a long way from being a new or even recent feature, and it's been a prominent part of our client-side website since the outset ... yet somehow he's managed to never see it before. He's now warbling on about how nice it looks, and how wonderful it is we're able to do such great things.

"Great things" in this case simply being the provision and correct formatting of information on our website. What he only dimly grasps is that this only happens when I become aware that someone's posted semi-unintelligble rubbish on our site and go in to clean it up. I suppose I should be pleased at the unintended compliment, but I'd rather he and the Stress Fiend just did it properly in the first place.

*****

Only minutes after that, he announces he's decided unilaterally to give out client details to people too cheap to actually pay for their own stuff. That way the tightwads can ring our clients directly and try to harass them into giving up their software. This fits comfortably within his definition of excellent client service, and saving the organisation money.

Oh, god. The Invertebrate thinks that letting random people harass our clients rather than manageing the task ourselves (which, you know, is part of what we're supposed to be doing here) is a good idea.

*****

"Did you book me in for a training course?"

It turns out that he's just received a request for feedback for a training course he was apparently supposed to attend last week.  Investigation turns out that Ted had, in fact, registered himself for it.

"But how was I supposed to know when it was on?"

More investigation reveals that the course is recorded in his calendar. Where he entered it. After receiving the invitation from the people running the half-day course.

"Oh, I never look at my calendar. They should have reminded me."

Presumably because he hasn't actually worked out how to set a reminder in the calendar he doesn't use.

The Invertebrate tells him to register for the next course.

"But I don't really want to do it."

"But I want you to do it."  (This is close as The Invertebrate gets to ever reminding Ted who's actually - nominally - in charge here.)

The course? Customer Service Skills.

Who edits the editor?

Damn The Invertebrate for telling Ted E. it was possible to edit html files in Word.

I know he only did it to stop Ted hyper-ventilating the first time he opened an html editor, but going in afterward to clean up the resulting mess is time-consuming and tiresome given that Ted's editorial skills are at a level where if there was a way for him to glue coloured string and macaroni to an electronic document, he'd be doing it.

Hysterical Revisionism

No, you idiot. When I tell you that someone didn't speak to me about something, that means they didn't speak to me about something. Just because you saw me talking to them three days ago doesn't mean I was talking to them about the one thing that's rattling around in your empty skull at the moment.

Printing off a piece of paper about the thing you think I must have been talking out and waving it at me as documentary evidence will not magically rewrite the past and cause me to suddenly admit that yes, that's exactly what happened and I've just been lying about it all along.