Destroying the Precious.

La Mondaine is rummaging through Ted's drawers. She says it's because she's looking for some extra copies of software she's sure he has*, but she kept burrowing well beyond that point until she found some of Ted's attempts at documentation and process management. Naturally it didn't relate to anything he did, but was about how he thought everyone else should be doing their jobs, particularly those parts that he didn't understand and didn't want to acknowledge.

La Mondaine takes it to the Stress Fiend, who casts her eye over it, laughs mockingly at points that are clearly directed at me, and then tells La Mondaine "Just bin it."

"Are you sure? Should I show it to The Invertebrate?"

"It's not worth it. Just get rid of it."

"But what if it comes back to bite me?" La Mondaine begins hyperventilating. "What if it comes back?"

She decides that rather than taking it straight to The Invertebrate, she'll take it to me instead.

Lucky me.

She hands it over with a level of anxiety beyond all proportion to the contents, as though it's a confession signed by the secret rulers of the world tying together every great conspiracy theory formulated by a desperate and paranoid internet.

I look it over. I  look at it again. The words are English, but...

... the document is pure Ted. So much so that I feel like I should be wearing lead-lined gloves and safety goggles to protect me from the malignant, self-righteous stupidity that practically radiates from the random assortment of printouts he's stapled together and extensively annotated with cryptic remarks in red ink. But that's only the supporting documentation: there's also a two-page cover document attached that's apparently meant to explain it all.

Page 1: three sections, marked "Stakeholder/s", "Current process", and "Suggested change & Why". Each heading is carefully underlined, and each section is completely blank.

Page 2 is where Ted gets down to his in-depth analysis of the matter at hand. Whatever that matter actually is: it's a little hard to tell in the absence of any identified stakeholders, objective, or context.

There's a point #3, and a point #4B, but no points 1-2, 4, or 4A. There's a Point "?" that seems to urge against updating details that other teams need to do their job. Unusually for Ted there's also punctuation, although this mostly takes the form of capitalisation that's obviously been copied from an existing document, and arbitrary use of block capitals and underlining where he appears to be indirectly shouting at either me or the Stress Fiend.

Naturally it's all written in red biro, using scrap paper salvaged from the recycling bin, giving it the look and feel of some impoverished descendant of the kind of ancient prophetic text traditionally scrawled by angry, raving madmen using their own blood and parchment made from human skin. (Moral: they don't make angry, raving madmen like they used to).

The general thrust, from what I can tell, is that we - or, specifically, Ted - shouldn't actually be asked to do anything, and should just pass all our work on to another team and let them sort it out. Although they could only sort it out by coming back to us for advice ... but then it would come back to me or the Stress Fiend to deal with, so I can see how Ted would view this as an efficient labour-saving process.

Trying to read it sequentially is just bewildering. Trying to think like Ted and read it out of sequence as a series of random points not only doesn't help, either, but threatens to induce catastrophic brain damage. Nevertheless, I've studied it long enough to safely conclude it contains nothing of any use.

La Mondaine is still hanging over my desk, eyes wide and staring, breathing in short, sharp gasps of muted terror, with  her hands extended ready to snatch it back. I move my chair carefully to place more of the desk between us.

"No, there's nothing here we need to keep. It can get tossed," I tell her.

"But surely I should show The Invertebrate?" She reaches for it expectantly. I don't offer it, as it's clear the pages exert some terrible power over the feeble-minded and La Mondaine still clings to the myth that Ted was the Keeper of Ancient And Terrible Knowledge.

"There's nothing here to show him. It's not even written in a way that would make sense to anyone except Ted."

"But what if I throw it out and it comes back to bite me?" Her hands open and close unconsciously.

"How?" It's unkind, I know, but I throw reason at her.

"What?"

"How can it possibly come back to bite you? He doesn't work here anymore, he didn't do anything with it while he was here, and - " I glance at the printouts. "It's dated June 2009! Why are we even bothering with this? It's over eighteen months old!"

"It's not, it's recent!"

"What year are we in?"

"..."

But at least she's stopped hyperventilating. In fact, she's stopped breathing at all.

"Exactly."

"But it might come back to bite me!"

I bin it. Her face is a mask of horror and, for once, it's not just due to the quarter-inch of make-up she trowels on each morning. There's almost something despairing about the way she withdraws her hands and turns back to her desk.

And then, a few minutes later, I retrieve it for posterity. Some things are such perfect examples of their type that they should be preserved for future generations.

Or, at least, for making fun of online at a later date.

---

* Teaching Ted how to duplicate CDs was a major undertaking that nearly made The Invertebrate's head explode and, for me, remains one of the highlights of The Invertebrate's learning curve with Ted. But once he mastered the art of clicking a couple of buttons, he never looked back. In fact he started mass-producing CD sets because it was less effort to keep churning them out and losing them than actually making sure loan copies were accounted for and returned.

In case of explosion ... why not try an oxygen mask?

If the last entry didn't convince you that La Mondaine shouldn't be allowed to watch the news (or leave you wondering how she manages to dress herself in the morning without hanging herself from a ceiling fan by her underwear), then this should do the trick.

Last year the Pike River coal mine in New Zealand suffered a series of explosions over several days, trapping and killing twenty-nine miners. La Mondaine, in her running day-long analysis of ... well, everything that passed before her eyes, really, began declaiming loudly that if it was one of her children in the mine, she'd be rushing down the mine right away.

Noting that the Stress Fiend appeared singularly unimpressed, and putting this down to the Stress Fiend having no children (and no interest in having children) she turned to me for support.

Yeah, I know.

"Wouldn't you do the same?" she asked, wide-eyed and breathless with the great dramatic possibilities of it all.

"No," I replied with equal parts truth and malicious desire to puncture her Heroic Parent Fantasy.

"How could you not? They're your children! I'd be in there so fast if it was my boys!"

"Because I don't know a thing about mines. Because it's two kilometres underground. And because the mine is probably filled with explosive, poisonous gas." (The mine experienced three more explosions over the next few days).

La Mondaine floundered for a few seconds. Apparently it hadn't occurred to her that there were legitimate reasons parents and loved ones weren't being permitted - and in face weren't being actively encouraged - to mount their own rescue expeditions.

Then she threw sanity overboard, and rallied to her cause.

"I'd wear an oxygen mask!"

"That wouldn't help with explosive gas."

"I'd attach an air-hose!"

- WTF? -

"Explosive  gas," I remind her. "I don't think the air hose will help much with that."

"The other end of the hose would be outside the mine. That would be safe."

(Because as everyone knows exploding gas is only a danger when inhaled. I feel, somehow, that Bill Clinton may be ultimately to blame here.)

"Two kilometres underground," emphasises the Stress Fiend. "That's a lot of hose to carry with you."

"But it would protect me from the explosive gas," she insists, lost in daydreams of braving the dark and the heat and the flames to rescue her children from Certain Death when all the world has given up on them, proving once and for all to her sons that they can't live without their mother.

"I'd do it," she says bravely, lower lip almost quivering with doomed heroism, "I'd do it for my boys."

And it probably makes me a terrible person, but it's hard not to hope that maybe, one day, she'll get the chance...

Après le déluge, La Mondaine.

With the flood cleanup in progress and likely to remain so for some considerable time to come, La Mondaine (like many) is struggling to come to grips with events.

Not that she was affected by the flooding. No, it's the television footage that's confusing her:

"... and there were all these big piles of mud - huge piles, like giant blobs of chocolate ice-cream - all lined up in a row just back from the road, and I just don't understand how they got there."

A passing tech, who spent most of last week watching his neighbourhood being excavated from beneath the silt, paused to explain that the piles were placed there by bobcat operators as part of the cleanup.

"But where did the mud come from for them to make such big blobs? When they showed you the streets nearby, there was hardly any mud at all!"

I don't know what reality La Mondaine lives in, but it seems certain it only intersects ours occasionally and I believe we should all be grateful for that.

Dreams, nightmares ... there's always some overlap

Dedicated to La Mondaine, who should never have been allowed to see Inception because she's been relentlessly driving people crazy every since wanting someone to explain the ending to her:

Taking the high ground

Naturally, with three-quarters of the state underwater, the route between my home and work remains resolutely above water and perfectly serviceable. Worse, there's no possibility that the waters will claim my workplace and wash the earth clean of its unholy taint or, at least, the last lingering traces of Ted.

On the bright side, though, the Stress Fiend is cut off and won't be joining us for a while, although for The Invertebrate's peace of mind it might have been nice if she'd contacted him or answered his phone calls to let him know this, rather than leaving him to worry she'd been swept away by the floodwaters sometime in the last twenty-four hours.

In fact there's almost no-one here, so it's unusually peaceful. Not overly productive, of course, because big chunks of our corporate infrastructure are running on skeleton staff, some parts are underwater, and half our internet link has been shut down because of flooding and power outages (with the other half possibly following if things get worse) but, as I say, "peaceful".

Oh, 2011, I hate you already...

A general plea to clients:

• please, please stop migrating from a PC to a Mac and then acting surprised when none of the Windows software you've purchased - especially the Windows-only software - is available on your new computer. Yes, there are ways of working around this, but they will cost you more money and you need to think about these things first instead of just buying something because it's shiny;
• if you're going to use multiple email addresses to contact us with queries, try checking those email accounts for replies instead of switching to a new identity and complaining that we've never gotten back to you;
• on a related that note, read your emails instead of doing whatever it is you do with them now, which I can only assume is to gaze blankly at the screen while trying to divine the desired meaning through some form of visual osmosis;
• please don't apply security settings to your emails so that it's impossible for us to reply to them directly. That's just retarded;
• stop making shit up. Seriously, just because you make up a non-existent version of Microsoft Office containing applications that have never been part of an Office suite doesn't mean it now exists. Getting offended at us because we won't provide you with MS Office Ultimate Enterprise Mega-Edition with Magical Sparkly Unicorn 2010 isn't going to make any difference and only makes everyone unhappy;
• if you don't like getting the same answer every time, either stop asking the same question or follow the advice we gave you the first time around.

Welcome to 2011

The Stress Fiend: "I'm just logging a job for this client so they don't get confused. She just needs some software reinstalled, so should I log it as a reinstallation job, or one to have her computer reimaged?"

"Just as a reinstall."

"But that's not an option."

So why are you asking me as though it is?