It's one of those "need to know" things..

Because we've been officially understaffed since the start of this year, and unofficially understaffed since the start of last year, things get missed or held up. It's unavoidable, and it's been such a long, long struggle to fill the empty position that I've stopped letting it worry me when aspects of the team's role I'm not responsible for start to fall apart (which is why this pretty much sums up my attitude to the escalation notices from the service desk.

Senior management have received a complaint from a client about a request they submitted and which no-one's responded to yet, and a Sternly Worded Email (also overly-long, weirdly formal and excessively pompous) has descended to our level.

The Invertebrate consults with the Stress Fiend.

"The client says they've tried to ring several times but no-one's answered and no-one's called him back," he reads from the email.

"They always say that. You know what clients are like." She gestures towards the phone. The LED that indicates voice mail is dark. "See? No messages."

I note, though, that she carefully omits the bit about how she keeps turning the voice mail off so that clients can't leave messages...

Stupid *and* otherworldly

Somehow I managed to tune this out last week when it originally happened, but La Mondaine shared her secret to successful speed-reading: "It's easy. You just teach yourself to ignore the consonants."

The Stress Fiend related this gem to me. There was a couple of seconds' while I tried to imagine this in practice, followed by a good several minutes of helpless laughter and another hour of sudden, intermittent sniggering.

So with that in mind, I give you Hamlet , Act III, Scene 1 (the "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy) as interpreted by La Mondaine:

O e, o o o e--a i e eio:
ee 'i oe i e i o e
e i a ao o oaeo oe
O o ae a aai a ea o oe
A ooi e e. o ie, o ee--
o oe--a a ee o a e e
e eaae, a e oa aa o
a e i ei o. 'i a oaio
eo o e ie. o ie, o ee--
o ee--eae o ea: a, ee' e,
o i a ee o ea a ea a oe
e e ae e o i oa oi,
ie ae. ee' e ee
a ae aai o o o ie.
o o o ea e i a o o ie,
' oeo' o, e o a' oe
e a o eie oe, e a' ea,
e ioee o oie, a e
a aie ei o ' o ae,
e e ie i i ie ae
i a ae oi? o o ae ea,
o a ea e a ea ie,
a e ea o oei ae ea,
e ioee o, o oe o
o aee e, e e i,
A ae ae ea oe i e ae
a o oe a e o o o?
oiee oe ae oa o a,
A e aie e o eoio
I iie o'e i e ae a o o,
A eeie o ea i a oe
i i ea ei e a
A oe e ae o aio. -- o o o,
e ai Oeia! -- , i oio
e a i eeee.

If Cthulhu tried to yodel "Old MacDonald Had A Farm", this is what it would sound like.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

By now it's been fairly well-established that when it comes to dealing with the Stress Fiend, there are no winners.

Clients are excoriated for not reading and following instructions and then, when they do follow the Stress Fiend's instructions to the letter and the instructions are wrong, it's still their fault for failing to read her mind.

Ted E. was routinely snarled at for palming work on to her, and was just as routinely snarled at for touching anything she wanted control of, whether or not anyone knew it was "her" work and whether or not what she wanted it for made any sense.

Now she's decided to elevate things to a new level of crazy. Yesterday afternoon she suddenly began ranting about being invited to a meeting about a project to streamline and standardise purchasing and deploying software to our clients.

"Just who does this person think they are, inviting me to a meeting?"

It's hard to work out quite what had her so enraged, as (unsurprisingly) she'd have been apoplectic if the project had made any decisions about this without consulting anyone in the team responsible for a fairly important part of the process. But rant she did, at great length, and right up until it was time to leave.

I walk in this morning to find her raving at The Invertebrate about it, even angrier and more inarticulate than she was yesterday afternoon. How does she maintain the rage like that without inducing a stroke? Or does she just walk in through the door in the mornings, flip her inner Berserker Fury switch to the 'on' position and go for it?

"How dare they ask me to contribute anything to this? Where do they get off inviting me to a meeting without even asking me first if I want to come to a meeting in the first place? I've a good mind to just refuse to go at all!"

And in that last exclamation lies a hint of the method beneath the madness.

Because if she doesn't attend the meeting, she has a ready source of Rage Fuel for when the project inevitably makes a recommendation that doesn't take into account something we need to do here and it will be all their fault.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned, in fact, by simple proximity.

Something in the water?

Context is all-important, but even for this place the last few days have been utterly deranged. The Stress Fiend likes to claim that the lunatics are running the asylum, but I'm not sure that's the case. If my workplace is anything to go by, they've either reduced the amount of anti-psychotics in the water supply, or increased them to dangerous levels.

The Stress Fiend was in explosive form at the tail end of  last week:

"I can't believe how much paper we have to waste printing off all this stuff just to satisfy some outdated and arbitrary process that everyone but me wants to get rid of! This place is unbelievable!"

"What  do you mean you didn't know about that arbitrary and undocumented charge I've been adding to random orders for some clients and not others?"


... and around the same time I had to convince her that no, I hadn't seen the new Elmo doll, nor had I been keeping up with the latest developments in Two And A Half Men.

I retaliated by throwing tricky, work-related questions at her, because I am nothing if not subtle:

"Has that purchase order to renew the support on some business-critical systems gone out yet?"

"Oh! No! I'd have had it out hours ago if someone hadn't made waste hours trying to work out what was wrong with their software!"

Except ... the only person who "made" her do that, was her. And she's had this order on her desk for a week.

Five minutes later: "Arrhhh! This software installation is still failing in exactly the same way everyone's been telling me it fails!"

And now, with La Mondaine back in the office, we're experiencing a perfect storm of stupidity, starting with the two of them trying to locate some old software.


"Who makes Corel Draw software?"

"I think it's Corel."

"Really? Are you sure? Who used to make it?"

"I'm pretty sure it used to be Corel..." They drag me into it. "Who used to make Corel Draw?"

"Corel Draw? I'm fairly confident Corel have always made Corel Draw."

They go back to discussing it aomngst themselves, seeing as I'm clearly being no help. Searching the internet for answers is no help, because while Corel claim on their website that they make it, what would they know?

"Are you sure it's not Autodesk?"

I'm not sure what causes them to admit defeat, but eventually they concede the software is actually made by the company whose name it's borne for the last twenty years. Now they have to try to find the installation discs which, you may recall, has been one of the things La Mondaine is meant to have been working on for the last year or so.

The Stress Fiend looks expectantly at La Mondaine. "Well?"

La Mondaine looks guilty. "Well... I might not have filed all those CDs absolutely exactly in order just yet ..."

Eventually the discs are retrieved .. from the large plastic disposal bin where La Mondaine had thrown them in a frenzy of getting rid of what she considers "old" software. So whatever absolutely exact filing system she thinks she's using, the madness:method ratio is gravely unbalanced.

It's a hellish way to start the week.