30 August, 2010

Working with an unnecessary evil

Well, the holiday is over. It wasn't a holiday in the traditional sense - not for me, at any rate - but La Mondaine went on a cruise for a few days the week before last and came back from that (as people often seem to do) with some hideous disease that kept her away for another week.

Ah, happy times... Even the Stress Fiend admitted it was easier to get work done without her here. "I like having her around again, but it's just so much easier to get things done when I don't have to keep explaining things to her." So clearly bringing her back to cover the Ted Gap is ... well, actually, it's working quite well. Just not in the way expected by any of the people who thought it was a good idea.

For the record, I'd just like to state again that I was not one of them.

But she's back now, and in between devouring most of the Stress Fiend's morning like so:

  • "How do I do this again?"
  • "What was the name of that nice man who used to work in... where did he used to work again?"
  • "Why don't we do it this way anymore?"
  • "But don't you remember how we used to have to do it?"
  • "Do you ever hear from ..." mixed with "Did you hear about..."
... she's also reminded me quite why it is I actually prefer having no-one (or even Ted) to having La Mondaine here by trying to pry extensively into my personal life.

"But aren't you stressed? Why aren't you on anti-depressants?You should be on anti-depressants!" Following which she proceeds to rattle off a string of pharmaceutical and herbal remedies she thinks I should be on because she can't imagine how she'd cope.

On the other hand I don't need to imagine how she'd cope, because I'm seeing it right now: she'd cope poorly. Very, very poorly. Her grown-up-and-left-home children have fallen into yet another crisis due to non-payment of bills and her mobile phone is ringing hot as she tries to fix things up for them. This has been a recurrent feature since her return so it's little wonder, really, that her offspring (who I'm sure can't be that much younger than me) are incapable of looking after themselves. It can only be a matter of time before one of them calls wanting to know what to do when he's exhausted all the possible ways he can wear one pair of underpants.

And if she ever has grandchildren it will be a disaster of Roland Emmerich proportions, only without the complex characterisation and intelligent plotlines. Think 2012 with the subtlety and grace of Dumb & Dumber.

Anyway, in between wittering on about the latest domestic dramas (many of which seem to revolve around the fact that she and her husband of decades still annoy one another and haven't merged into some warm, fuzzy, collective hive mind), she's also had the brilliant idea that she needs to come in for an extra day each week to work with Ted to learn all the great secrets she's convinced he holds. Which ... is really kind of mind-blowing when you think about it. She's worked with him before; she's seeing firsthand again how little he does now. Yet she still buys into the myth of Ted E. as the guardian of hidden knowledge, without which everything will fall apart.

I suspect I should probably be irritated by that (and no doubt will be at some point), and the thought of La Mondaine being here an extra day each week is certainly one that wants to make me weep ... but, on the other hand, it means she and Ted can make each other suffer directly, and on that basis I think I can put up with it for a time.

As long as I don't think about the fact we could have hired someone else.

20 August, 2010

Context Fail

I've mentioned the Stress Fiend's inability to provide any kind of context when she starts complaining about something. Here's a sample from this morning:

"Argh! This damn chick! I've had it with her! I'm going to ..."

"What's the problem?" I'm looking at our shared inbox as she mutters and there's an email she might be referring to. Or might not. It's hard to tell.

"Oh, it's this damn chick again! She just ... urgh! ... I don't know how many times I've told her ... Ooh! Shiny!"

10 August, 2010

Teaching pigs to sing would be easier.

The Stress Fiend continues trying to show La Mondaine what she's supposed to be doing.

"Now you just do this."

"I do this?"

"No, just this."

"Then this?"

"No, only this."

"Okay, then I do this?"

"No, just this."

"Oh, I get it. Then I do this?"

"No, just this."

"What about this?"

"No, only this."

... repeat for several minutes. Move on to next record.

09 August, 2010

This is why I try to leave him in his cave with the Precious.

"Hi, Gollum. We're about to go live with this software. Your team will be doing most of the support, so can you spare someone to do a couple of test install to make sure there are no unexpected tricks to it? That's all we're waiting on now."

"No! We're far too busy to check whether we're able to install something without incident! Give it to another team with fewer resources, who work in a completely different environment to test!"

This is why Gollum is loved and revered by his team: there aren't many team leaders around here willing to shield his people from learning stuff ahead of time that might be useful to them.

05 August, 2010

When the cat's away...

... well, let's face it, if mice were as retarded as Ted E. they'd play regardless of whether the cat was there or not.

Ted took advantage of me being off sick for a few days by restarting his campaign against how I've been managing recurring charging on some things.  This has come up a few times over the last twelve months or so, and several times already this year.  The last time saw The Invertebrate trapped in his office for an hour and a half trying to explain to Ted why (a) why these charges are different, and (b) why they needed to be handled differently (rather than Ted's favoured solution, which is a one-size doesn't-fit-anyone-except-maybe-Godzilla option). The Invertebrate came out thinking he'd made progress, but while we were at a meeting Ted spent the afternoon laboriously composing an email that boiled down to "I don't understand, I disagree, and here's how he can make it consistently fail to work for anyone."

This time around it was more of the same.  Instead of padding out the charging details with meaningless fluff, I've reworked the system slightly indicate the period for which the charge applied. I'm not sure quite what it is about this that bugs Ted, but bug him it very clearly is and he resumed harping while I wasn't around to shoot him down.

Then he went one further and rang my predecessor for some expert advice to bolster his case.  I won't go into all the reasons why this just beggars belief, but it was particularly funny that Ted chose this round of charging as the battleground, because it's one where my predecessor had us operating  in a massive breach of license compliance terms for several years (when I worked it out after I took over, it turns out we'd exceeded our usage by 1,667%).  I don't know what Ted actually told him, but it wouldn't really have mattered: his grasp of how our databse was actually used was only slightly less shaky than his grasp of how it needed to be used.

(And yet he was its principal designer. If you've ever wondered why I spend so much time in the background of the database repairing and modifying things, look no further for an explanation).

Not that this prevented Ted from declaring to The Invertebrate "I asked him because he knows all about how it's meant to work, and how we're supposed to be using it."  My predecessor agreed with Ted that we were definitely making too much work for ourselves, which was all the ammunition Ted needed to stroll into The Invertebrate's office to tell him we were doing things wrong, with a brief detour by the Stress Fiend to tell her:

"I've found a mentor who understands what I'm talking about and agrees with me."

Which, while almost certainly accurate from a technical point of view, didn't quite yield the results he expected.

"I lost it a little bit," The Invertebrate told me the next day, "Actually, I think I might have gone right off at him."  No "might" about it, apparently. According to the Stress Fiend, after the office door opened and Ted fled to lunch, The Invertebrate emerged looking a little sheepish, came over to her and asked:

"Uh, could you hear me yelling out here?"

Ted went home early with a headache, though, which always counts as a win.

The Invertebrate filled me in the next morning, because he'd placed it on the team meeting agenda "to get it behind us properly once and for all".  None of us were particularly looking forward to it, but being yelled at must have given even Ted a hint of where things were going because when the agenda item came around:

"No, no.  I understand now.  It all makes sense to me."

No. I don't believe it, either.

(We've all agreed this means in about two to four weeks it's going to come up again.  I estimate two, The Invertebrate leans optimistically towards four, but either way it's up to him to deal with it when it rears its stupid ugly head again, leaving me to sit quietly and listen for the yells from The Invertebrate's office. And The Invertebrate (hopefully) has learnt a valuable lesson - you need to brutalise Ted on a fairly regular basis if you want him to toe the line even temporarily.  It's not an ideal management style, but when you're not allowed to physically beat staff sometimes you just have to make do.)

Ted's ears pricked up later in the meeting when we mentioned my predecessor was coming over for a meeting this week, but appeared visibly crestfallen to learn his mentor had chosen one of Ted's official off-days for his visit.  Then he tried to find out whether my predecessor was reachable by any kind of instant-messaging client, but as Ted doesn't actually understand what instant messaging actually is, it was very easy to tell him "No, his organisation doesn't use Lotus Sametime" and watch his hopes of discrete consultation with the Master of All Things Licensing collapse.

I suspect he was destined for disappointment, anyway. The Invertebrate was still fuming about when he ran into the Mentor of Ted socially later that evening and "suggested" he not give Ted any further encouragement about how we should do things with systems my predecessor doesn't understand or have any part of.

02 August, 2010

Waste, guano, and Ted E.

We've just uncovered a hitherto unknown stroke of genius on Ted E.'s part, in his never-ending quest to save himself some work. One of Ted's tiny handful of duties is to duplicate software, label it, and distribute it to clients. Some of this software is available for both Windows and Macintosh, but very rarely on the same disc.

At some point Ted decided that having a separate label for the Windows and Mac versions fell into what he would class as "making extra work for ourselves" and simply edited the label template to make a generic label declaring the software to be "Win/Mac". After all, being able to tell the separate Windows and Mac discs apart would just be silly, right? The half-second it takes to choose one label over another - or the extravagant *handful* of seconds it would take to update the label - is clearly an unacceptable waste of corporate resources, even if, as resources go, Ted's about on par with the mined-out guano pits of Nauru.

La Mondaine is now wailing as she sorts through a pile of Ted's "Win/Mac" discs to work out which ones are which. Sadly that's not quite as funny as it sounds, but it's making the Stress Fiend suffer, too, so it's not without a positive side.