25 March, 2011

Too lazy to lie.

We've just discovered the reason we haven't been able to trace a particular invoice in the financial systems is because Ted E. decided that rather than record the invoice number, he'd use a software serial number. And not even the software associated with that invoice, because that might offer a tentative clue enabling us to track the invoice down.

So he used the serial number of the previous version of the software instead.

It's hardly a revelation that Ted was a little arbitrary when it came to recording invoice details, and we already knew he made a lot of them up when he couldn't be bothered looking at the actual invoice. Back in the brief period when we had our fourth, super-efficient team member, that was one of the very first things she discovered.

No, what's surprising with today's discovery is that in his final year here he became too lazy to even make stuff up anymore, and just settled for copying random strings of characters from other sources. So who knows what other instances of delight and hilarity he laid in store for us before finally leaving?

(This all came to light because a client provided us with a quote they'd obtained, and wanted us to order it for them. We did - at a better price - passed the savings on to them, and somehow incurred the wrath of their auditors, who are now strenuously demanding a copy of all the paperwork to justify the lower cost. So no good deed goes unpunished.)

21 March, 2011

The enemy of my enemy

Well, in this case the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, but that hasn't really kept the Stress Fiend and I from tag-trolling La Mondaine through most of the day so far. There's a wealth of guilty pleasure to be mined there, but I should probably stop taking the easy shots.

Maybe tomorrow...

15 March, 2011

Stress Fiend Lottery

Today we're playing Stress Fiend Lotto. She called in sick yesterday, hasn't turned up yet today, but hasn't been in touch to say whether she'll be in or not.

"Probably not" seems the likeliest answer but, as past experience shows, she likes to keep us in suspense. She also subscribes to the belief that as long as she calls in sick on the first day, we should assume "sick" until she eventually reappears. It's these little bits of quirky unpredictability, amongst other things, that make working with her such a delight.

Will she turn up?

Will she not turn up?

Will we see or hear from her at all this week?

Nobody knows...

14 March, 2011

Upskilling

The Stress Fiend has been honing her communications and customer service skills lately, focusing on a couple of parts of her position description in particular:

ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY WITH CLIENTS AT ALL LEVELS
Whenever someone calls her from an internal number, she won't answer her phone until she's looked the number up in the internal directory so she can see who they are. If the number isn't listed, she won't answer and just lets the phone ring out ... again, and again, and again.
If the number is listed, she'll sometimes decide arbitrarily that it's about something they're "supposed" to call us about on the general number, and will just let it ring out.
Then when she does pick up, she either explodes with so much false bonhomie that passing birds fall dead from the sky, or (if it's someone she's friendly with) snarls angrily down the phone about the stupidity of our clients.
Occasionally, for variety, she'll sneer condescendingly at a client and imply that everything is somehow their fault.
*****
"I'm sick of people always emailing me directly when they know they're supposed to send stuff to the team's general account. Move the emails into the shared Inbox so other people can act on them and reply from there? Why would I want to do that? People might find out what I'm up to if I did that!"

DEMONSTRATED GOOD CLIENT SERVICE ATTITUDE AND SKILLS
Oh, where to begin, where to begin... She's been excelling herself here, lately.
One of the annoying things our clients tend to do is ignore any of the information published on our website, or that they suspect hasn't been personally tailored for their unique situation that's just like 90% of the other requests we also get. Instead, they prefer long personal phone calls and email exchanges, where we reiterate the published information or confirm that no, the form letter they received wasn't an elaborate practical joke perpetrated at their expense.
(In fairness, I get the impression that some of the clients who've been around for a while have sound historical reasons for distrusting anything on the organisation's intranet, and as for form letters ... well, let's just say that whenever Ted laid his hands on a form letter, his unique cut-and-paste skills had all the elegance of a starving wolverine and a wounded elk, with none of the wolverine's clarity of purpose.)
In any case, the Stress Fiend erupts every time a client asks us to confirm something they've already been told, or asks us to (essentially) read aloud to them the email they've just received from us. It's frustrating, beyond a doubt, and in a sane world you could be forgiven for thinking that we'd treasure and nurture those clients who do read what we send them (or, at the very least, have them stuffed and mounted to preserve them for future generations).
But, alas, my workplace does not exist in a sane world. In fact, as should be well and truly obvious by now, it exists on some obscure plane of Hell and I've been confined here for what I can only presume were vile crimes committed in a previous life. In which case I can only hope my past self had enough fun to make it worthwhile. The bastard.
Anyway. To paraphrase:
"These idiot clients! What do they think they're doing?"
I look at what they've done. I look at what she's told them to do, and...
"They've done exactly what you told them to do?"
"Yes! Exactly! They should know by now they're supposed to do something completely different from that! Just because I told them to do it doesn't mean they should do it. Why aren't they reading my mind and doing what I want them to do instead of what I tell them to do? How can they be so f***ing stupid?"
***** 

And if that wasn't a clear enough case of someone wanting to have their Rage Cake and eat it, try this for size:
"GRAAARRRR!" she roars, looking at our job queue. "Why are there idiots not giving us the details, like the name of the person this is actually for?"
I brave the madness of the service desk queue and have a look. Sure enough, there are a whole bunch of newly-created jobs listed for "anonymous", and because they all appear to have been system-generated jobs there isn't even anyone we can contact to fill in the gaps. In fact...
"It looks like these have all been generated by those new web-forms that were put up for us a few days ago."
"They are. And these frigging idiots just aren't filling it out right!"
I have a look at the offending web forms.
"I see the problem. The form design doesn't have any place for the clients to enter any of those details."
"Oh, yeah, I know about that. But they should bloody well enter them into the 'additional information' field that's there for them!"
"Or we could just get the form redesigned so that it actually captures the information we need."
"No,  not yet. I'll give it a month and see how things go before asking them to redo the form for us."
"Oh..." Because it doesn't need a lot of foresight to guess how things are going to go. And, scant minutes later:
"And there's another one who hasn't filled everything out! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!?" 

Maintaining the rage.

The Stress Fiend likes to rant. This is the kind of physical constant the Einsteins and Hawkings of the world wish they could discover.

Every day last week, on opening our service desk queue, she'd proceed to rant about people asking us for advice on audiovisual equipment, which isn't just outside our area of expertise, it's not something that should even be getting logged to us in the first place. I assumed that the daily rants were the result of serial stupidity on the part of clients or lazy support staff.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I was a bit tired and busy last week.

It turns out it was the same job each day. And it wasn't even one that kept circulating back to us: the Stress Fiend just wasn't transferring it on to where it needed to go, preferring to erupt into outraged martyrdom every time she noticed it again.

At this point I'd only be mildly surprised to learn she goes home at the end of each day and squeezes lemon juice into her own eyes just to maintain the rage.

01 March, 2011

Giving is its own reward.

La Mondaine is convinced she performed a prodigious amount of work when she started again with us last year, moving heaven and earth to fix up hundreds of records Ted just didn't feel were worth processing properly over a period of several months. In reality, she checked just under two months' worth. I know this because I wrote the report she was working from.

But, of course, what I know and what La Mondaine chooses to believe rarely seem to occupy the same planet...

"Can you run a report, to pick up the few records I missed? I know I fixed them all up all the way back to the start of last year, but I just want to finish any I might not have caught."

Now, I know exactly how far back the original report went and how long it took her to work through it. I also know there's no point whatsoever in trying to convince her that what she thinks she's asking for isn't what she's going to get.

"Will it be hard to run a new report?" she asks breathlessly, sounding yet again as though she's on the verge of a panic attack. "Can you do that?"

"Sure."

A couple of minutes later, I hand her a 75-page printout* listing the 2,500 or so records she was convinced she'd updated but hadn't even scratched.

And, yes, some could argue that this was a waste of paper. But that would only be because they didn't get to see the way her eyes bugged out of her head.


* Printed double-sided, of course. I might be willing to sacrifice half a tree in the name of giving La Mondaine a heart attack, but I'm not a complete environmental vandal.