28 February, 2011

The Wages of Stupidity: not as good as the Wages of Sin, but much easier to earn.

In an effort to keep La Mondaine away from any kind of computerised system, we've been desperately trying to come up with menial grunt-work that requires no brain power and has no serious repercussions when she inevitably gets it wrong.

(And yes, it almost certainly would be easier all round to just not have her come in anymore, but that's The Invertebrate's call and, well, you know by now how well that goes...)

We're scraping the bottom of the drudgery barrel at the moment, and thought that having her remove sticky labels from some plastic storage cases before returning them to their original owners would be simple enough. Don't ask how much she's being paid to do this - just accept that by anyone's standards it's way too much.

It's a vain hope, of course, and as it quickly turns out that even this is enough to paralyse her with indecision, creating a panic vortex that quickly expands to suck in The Invertebrate and the Stress Fiend. So at least there are some pleasant karmic overtones to the whole thing.

"But what should I do with the labels?"

"Just take them off!" "Just leave them on!" urge the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate simultaneously, before the latter hastily changes his mind to agree with the Stress Fiend.

"Take them off," he confirms.

"But they're on the cases!"

"Yes, that's why we're taking them off."

(I'm briefly tempted to inflict gratuitous pedantry on them all by pointing out that their being on the case in the first place is the only thing allowing this entire conversation to even exist in the first place, but then hurriedly think better of it.)

"But they're not our cases!"

"Exactly."

"But won't they get cross if we go around removing the labels from their cases?"

"No, because they're our labels."

"Then shouldn't we take the labels off before we give the cases back?"

... and it just kind of continues from there for several more minutes in an ever-tightening spiral of madness that I won't even attempt to record.

Explaining the obvious

"That's not available to staff members."

"So how do they get it?"

"They don't - that's what 'not available' means."

25 February, 2011

Some questions should never be asked

Looking beneath the surface of anything here is a terrible idea but, sometimes, someone is foolhardy enough to do so. I'm pretty sure it's not a part of my position description but, traditionally, this tends to be me.

This time around, I've been trying to make sense of something that I've always known intuitively was a mess, but was probably a mess with some underlying pretense of method, even if it was a pretense honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

In some respects, it seems, I'm a very slow learner.

After finally acknowledging that what I was looking at was pure, unadulterated chaos, I asked the Stress Fiend if she knew how to interpret the informational entrails I was struggling with.

Variations of "Don't know", "Ted always looked after that" and "Yeah, that's always been a tricky one, that..." haven't inspired much confidence.

23 February, 2011

Life's little miracles

I marvel, some days, that the Stress Fiend doesn't simply explode from trying to contain more bile and rage than mortal frame is meant to hold.

09 February, 2011

Gone, but not forgotten.

Today is officially Ted's last day of work. He hasn't actually been here for two months, nor has he actually done any real work here for oh, about two years or so. But now he's officially gone.

Sadly, this does not mean the demons of stupidity have been exorcised, and his former workmates have been conscientious in their efforts to ensure his niche doesn't go unfilled, as a small collection of random snippets from a typical day will demonstrate:


*****

"... and then I watched Mayo's Last Dancer."

*****

Angry ranting from the Stress Fiend about clients who read the information we provide them and then act on it, trusting that the information is current and accurate when, in this case, it isn't. I concede that the clients should indeed know better than that, but blaming them for taking her at her word does seem a tad unreasonable.

*****

La Mondaine sings along with her mobile phone's ringtone. And it's just a phone ringtone - not a song or piece of actual music that's been reused for the phone. Just a multi-note tone.

I should be grateful she doesn't use the Crazy Frog, I suppose.

*****

Medical science is turned on its head by the revelation that chainsaws cause osteoarthritis. La Mondaine insists that she never suffered from it until she used a chainsaw. Why was she using a chainsaw? I'm not going to ask. Not even to find out how it was she managed to not cut her own head off in the process.

"It must have been the chainsaw. What else could it have been?"

08 February, 2011

No-one deserves this.

La Mondaine shambles into work half an hour late and immediately shares her morning's bowel difficulties with us.

...

Perhaps I should rephrase that: "shares descriptions of her morning's bowel difficulties".

Now she's racking her brains to recall the comprehensive history of everyone else in the office who's ever suffered a stomach upset, presumably with a view to tracking them all down through the course of the day to compare symptoms.

07 February, 2011

Get off of my cloud.

It's every bit as bad as I feared: after searching the web and bewildering herself with terms like "infrastructure", "online applications" and "software as a service", La Mondaine struggles at length to reduce the Cloud to something she can understand.

Eventually she finds an answer that works: "Oh, I get it - it's when you use Facebook to back-up your photos!"

But then she immediately looks confused again: "But how will that help our department with what we're doing?"

Fortunately someone else in the office has brought in a baby to show off and La Mondaine, priding herself on being wonderful with children, forgets the mysteries of the Cloud and rushes off to torment the child.

Inane and patronising baby-talk drifts over the cubicle walls, followed a few seconds later by the screams of a terrified child.

Complete Loss Of User Data

Oh. Oh, this is going to be so painful.

La Mondaine has just heard about the concept of Cloud computing for the very first time and seems to think it's something unique to our organisation because she swears she's never heard the term used anywhere else "and no-one else uses it".

Now she's trying to learn more about it by searching the web, after the Stress Fiend and I refused to try to explain it to her.