More own worst enemies, and own-goals

The Stress Fiend, as I've mentioned, has an unerring ability to not only make her own job harder, but that of everyone else that comes into contact with her. I haven't done one of these for a very long time, so here's a pop quiz.

You're a technical support person, whose job it is to install software on a client's computer. To do this, you need  the following basic information:

• who is the client;
• what software are they allowed to have; and
• what serial numbers do they need to activate the software?

Keeping that in mind, which way of presenting the information is more useful to you? Grouping it by:

1. software title and version;
   or
2. an internal reference number generated by an in-house system to which you don't have access?

Now, the thing is that the way the Stress Fiend has organised this information (and I'm going to let you work out which option she's chosen) isn't even useful or convenient to us, so it's not like she's even just being too lazy to or disorganised to make it accessible to others: she's actively chosen to organise it in a way that's of no benefit to anyone at all.

Ted's touched on this before (not because he has any opinion about the way the information should be presented for the tech staff, but because he feels we shouldn't be doing it at all, although he's yet to suggest how they're supposed to get the information they need) and the Stress Fiend's argument at the time was that it allowed for "better control". I don't know of what, though. We already have that data organised in a more useful and accessible form in our primary database for our use, and the tech staff don't have write-access to be able to tinker with the information we make available to them, so ... I don't know. Really, I don't. It's one of those leaps of logic (or stress-induced psychosis) that I'm just not capable of following and really don't want to follow.

**********

And while we're on the subject of demented workmates, as opposed to the merely incompetent or psychopathic, she's managed to score another own-goal despite her absence for the last three days at a training course. Or, at least, that's where we thought she was. The trainer called this afternoon to tell The Invertebrate that the Stress Fiend has missed the last day of the course (along with the exam on its content), still has most of the training material with her, and how would The Invertebrate like to proceed?

The Invertebrate visibly rocked back in his chair, and is now wondering if and when the Stress Fiend ever planned to tell him she'd missed a day of the course at all.