28 November, 2011

Migration

The long, cruel and gibberingly-insane reign of Lotus Notes is finally drawing to a close here, and we're all slowly being migrated to the new Web Mail That Must Not Be Named. Or at least that's how I like to think of it: the decision was made several months ago, was one of the worst-kept secrets since I started working here, and yet no-one in middle management was allowed to actually speak the words aloud until the Grand Announcement ... which took a surprisingly long time to happen.

Anyway. No more Notes. Cause for rejoicing, you'd think, except for one thing: it's change.

Because we live an age of Staff Enablement (or, as it's colloquially known "Fix it yourself") parts of the actual migration between systems have been left to the end-users to do, following a series of slightly cryptic and mildly self-contradictory instructions emailed to those whose time has come. I'll admit I was a little bit cowboyish when my turn came, stopping just short of whooping triumphantly as I hit the 'Migrate Now' button, but the whole concept of a pre-migration checklist is based on the assumption you actually care whether the process succeeds and, well... *


Then it was the Stress Fiend's turn. I'd glanced at the instructions and decided I could happily ignore them. She scowled at them, but didn't actually attempt to digest what they said, and ranted at them instead. The results were predictable.

First she tried to log in before her migration was even being processed, and ranted angrily over her inability to log in. Clearly the whole system had failed, and was a monumental waste of resources. After several more attempts to log in before her new account even existed (including myriad combinations of usernames and passwords, rather than the one specific one she was told would work when the system was ready for her), she finally succeeded. But she's only just getting warmed up:

"I don't like this business about 'Stay signed in'."

"So don't stay signed in?"

"CHANGE! NEW THINGS! HATERAGEKILLARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!"

The initial ragefrenzy passes. She logs out, and then somehow is unable to log back in again.

I check the "What To Do If You Can't Sign In" email we were sent as an afterthought.

"Have you shut Firefox down and then started it again?"

"Yes! Of course I have. Heaps of time."

Then something seems to occur to her and she sounds almost like she's prepared to admit having made a mistake.

"Errr... so I have shut it down heaps of times but, ah, do you think it means just the window where I'm trying to log in, or all the other Firefox windows I've got open at the same time?"

"I think you'd want to shut all of them down."

"Oh..." The sound of several hasty mouse-clicks follows. "Well, it's a good thing I did that, too. Oh look! Suddenly it's decided to work! Typical. Now it's time for me to go home."

[pause]

"Arrrgghhh! How do you sign out of this stupid thing? Why did they have to pick such a useless, stupid, bloody wossname? What the hell were they ... oh. I click on where it says 'Sign Out'..."


* I've also been conscientious about managing important information correctly and not using my email as a document storage system, so there really isn't anything in there that's essential or irreplaceable. So, you know, I could legitimately not care if it didn't work.

25 November, 2011

An allegory in green

We recently changed from a supplier we'd been using for several years, which means someone else will be getting a million dollars or so over the duration of the next supply contract.

A week later, with Christmas starting to loom Putin-like over the horizon, suppliers are dredging through their databases, pulling out our contact details and sending us token gifts to remind us of their existence, and that we're still valued clients. In the past some of these gifts have included perishable items eight months past their use-by date and heavily-trodden boxes of chocolate, so it's not without a sense of amused cynicism that we look forward to this time of year.

A gift from our unsuccessful suppliers arrived: an extravagant serving of toffee-like confectionery wrapped in a range of seasonally-coloured foil. La Mondaine and The Invertebrate pounced on them immediately declared all of the colours except red to be inedible, and then proceeded to try to eat the rest anyway (declaring the green ones to be the worst).

Now ... what follows really tells you everything you need to know about my team-mates.

The Stress Fiend returned to work a day or so later and joined them, although in her typical spirit of contrariness she declared that The Invertebrate didn't know what he was talking about and the green ones were fine - as she then demonstrated by munching down as many of them as she could until reality struck and she realised that, in fact he was entirely correct. Which amused me, at least.

The Invertebrate then decided that the best way to deal with the green ones was to keep eating them and them alone until he became desensitised to them. This wasn't a great success, so he tried to eat a green one and another colour at the same time to see if he could cancel out the taste. Keep in mind that none of the flavours were actually pleasant to eat - the green ones were simply the worst of a very mediocre selection.

Over the next two days, the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate continued to plough their way through the poisoned toffee. Really, I wouldn't have been surprised if the toffees had been hand-delivered by an ancient and cackling crone bearing a basket of too-shiny apples. They were that bad. But not eating them simply never occurred to my team-mates. Even separating out the green abominations wasn't an option. I suggested doing exactly that so we'd have something to offer visiting clients or management, but when the others realised that by this point they'd have almost no non-green ones left (a good thing, surely?) they decided this was going too far.

(During all this, the Stress Fiend went through her daily ritual of buying the same kind of toxic hamburger from the cafeteria each day for lunch, muttering her version of Grace before eating it - "Oh, I'm so going to regret this. I just know it will come back on me later" - and then spending the rest of the day moaning about heartburn. Can you see a pattern emerging?)


And in the latest installment (post heartburn-burger) the Stress Fiend declares loudly "Those green ones really are the worst." She sounds suspiciously like she's chewing.

"Are you eating another one?"

"I have to. There are too many green ones now, and I need to even the numbers out."

24 November, 2011

Literal transcriptions, continued

"These are clowns, these bloody wossnames at ... these bloody wossnames at bloody ... at down bloody wossname down there!"

23 November, 2011

Ghouls (no punchline here - move along).

I think we're on firm ground in stating that La Mondaine is a ghoul. The only way she could be more of one would be if she hung around graveyards and had chunks of cadaver caught between her teeth, but here's the latest example, anyway.

Several weeks ago a couple of people in another part of the organisation were involved in a serious car accident. This is like heroin for La Mondaine and she begins relentlessly pumping people for details - she doesn't even know the pair that well and the kind of questions she's asking make it clear that she's had nothing to do with either of them in the last several years at least. Nevertheless, every detail is of vital importance. When another elderly colleague ambles by for his twice-weekly gossip session, she pounces on him for information.

"Who was driving? Was he hurt much? He wasn't? Oh, he must feel so awful. Does he feel awful? I'm sure he must. Tell me how awful he's feeling. I'd ask his wife, but she's taken time off to look after him while he recovers. He has to feel terrible, though. Are you sure you haven't heard how much guilt and suffering he's going through? Tell me everything you know about his pain! I must know! I want to wallow in it!"

It's not pretty. And then she switches to the more seriously-injured of the pair, who's still in hospital.

"Have you heard from him? Have you heard about him? Oh, it must be so awful for him! It must be so awful for his family! Does he have children? He does? Oh, the poor children! Oh, his poor wife what's-her-name! How is she coping. Has she told you how she's coping? It  must be hard for her. She must be suffering. How much is she suffering? A lot? More than a lot? How would you not despair? How could you keep going? Her anguish must reach to the heavens, so how can she possibly bear it? And with the kids, too!"

"Nah," says the elderly gossip. The other one, that is. "She's German." (Because apparently Germans are soulless, unemotional machines that just keep going regardless).

"She's not suffering? How can she not be? Tell me she is! She must be suffering in the face of this tragedy! Why is she not sharing her pain and stress with the rest of us like a normal person? Does she not understand that we hunger for her pain and are suffering, too? If I can't lick the fresh tears of grief from the faces of her and her children, why can no-one at least quantify her suffering for me, so that I can rest easy at night like the horrid Pain Vampire that I am?"

She may not have used those exact words, granted, but her morbid need to indulge and wallow in someone else's misfortune was genuinely sickening. She may even have dropped below the threshold separating the merely contemptible from the disgusting.

I have no punchline for this. It turns out there's no humour to be found here, not even in mocking her foibles. La Mondaine may well be the first complete failure as a human being it's been my misfortune to work alongside.

22 November, 2011

Killjoy was here

The Stress Fiend is away again, which means I'm once more forced to rummage through the offal of her deranged work practices. This time around, though, I get to have some petty revenge (above and beyond simply blogging about her foibles) and spoil her fun by actioning a request she's been sitting on out of spite for a fortnight because she doesn't like the person who placed it.

And I know this wasn't a simple oversight on her part, because I overheard her gloating about it the other day to a less-than-loyal underling of her victim.

15 November, 2011

Ravings

The Stress Fiend is many things. One of her more surprising guises is Language Purist, something that dovetails neatly with her instant rage at clients with foreign accents and young people who use text-message abbreviations in casual emails and instant message sessions. It's a testament to her ... uh ... well, something about her, anyway, that she doesn't let her own borderline literacy and general incoherence get in the way of condemning the linguistic shortcomings of others.

It also makes statements like this all the more bemusing (and this is an exact quote):

"Oh, that's right. That was another of those goddamn frigging wossname bloody ones, isn't it?"

I'm not even going to pretend to try to understand what that one was about.

14 November, 2011

Just another day...

Another week gets underway.

The Stress Fiend appears to have arrived pre-enraged. She looks at a job for us in the service desk queue and immediately begins ranting at the client:

"Oh. Oh! You only want the standard headset with that order, do you? Well, guess what, you stupid bitch - that's exactly what you're going to get!"

Because nothing puts a client in their place like shouting abuse at a written message and then giving them exactly what they want. Having dealt with that, she moves on to the next one, and proceeds to angrily denounce someone for not placing a request through us that they was never meant to go through our unit in the first place. I mention this to her.

"THAT'S NOT THE POINT!"

But I'm afraid - justifiably, I think - to ask what the point actually is, and let it go.

La Mondaine, meanwhile, is honing her comedic skills by pronouncing "PC" as "pissy" and then repeating it anxiously, hoping someone will notice and tell her how funny she is.

(If they don't find it funny, then they obviously have Asperger's syndrome. La Mondaine has conveniently divided the world into two kinds of people: normal people like her, and those with Asperger's. Turns out the latter make up a far larger percentage of the population than the so-called experts would have you believe. Who knew?)

07 November, 2011

Boldly plumbing new depths

La Mondaine has no sense of tact or what's socially appropriate. This is not news and, in fact, we can take this as the kind of universal constant that the Einsteins and Hawkings of the world can only dream of discovering.

However there are still moments when she somehow manages to go above and beyond the call, as she apparently felt obliged to demonstrate yet again recently:

"Hey! Remember that time your wife found the body of someone who'd just committed suicide? Wasn't it so horrible? Let's revisit it in excruciating detail while we're queuing in a crowded cafeteria and pore over how upsetting it was for everyone!"