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.