Santa Claus: not the only gentleman in red keeping lists

A couple of weeks ago I almost posted a mildly celebratory entry when it looked there was going to be no more La Mondaine for the the rest of the year and, possibly, at all. Luckily (remembering that there are many kinds of luck, and "good" is only one of them) I've worked here long enough to know better than to celebrate prematurely.

So when The Invertebrate asked last week (before going away for a month) whether we needed La Mondaine for anything before shutting down over Christmas, I wasn't completely surprised when the Stress Fiend claimed that yes, we did: there was stuff we absolutely had to have her back to do. For just one day. Apparently the Stress Fiend doesn't feel we're screwing up enough things by ourselves which, honestly, comes as a surprise to me given how many times in just the last week the Stress Fiend announced she'd fouled up the primary database by doing something inexplicable.

(I was less surprised that it was the same inexplicable thing every time. Rather than actually fix the mistake once she'd identified it, the Stress Fiend would exclaim loudly at the discovery, worry at it for a while until she accepted that it was, in fact, her fault ... and then forget about it until she'd try to run exactly the same process again a few hours later and encounter exactly the same problem.)


So, La Mondaine is back today. And, predictably, the Stress Fiend has called in sick, pleading a migraine. Probably because she spent the entire weekend working herself into one at the thought of having to deal with La Mondaine today.

This place really is a very special kind of Hell sometimes.

Freudian slips

It's telling that when the Stress Fiend begins working herself up to start a pointless fight about something, what she means to say is:

"I'm going to stir things up right now!"

But what actually comes out of her mouth is:

"I'm going to muddy the waters right now!"

Guess which one turns out to be the more reliable forecast?