Leaving a legacy

A wonderful moment from a meeting this week.

"Okay, then we'll need to put that into this system if we want it to work. Right?"

"That used to be right. Now it's been declared a legacy system, and we're not allowed to use it for any new work."

"Oh. Okay, then. What's the new system?"

"We don't have one."

[pause]

"Awesome!"

Introducing Rageboy.

Apparently I'm not posting enough. I can tell, because I get lost every time I sign in to Blogger and have to remember where Google have hidden all the menus this time. Usually I'm wanting to stab a Google web designer in the face within about five minutes.

Deciding what to write about is difficult at the moment, too. Partly because there's a bit of a shortage of the genuinely tragi-comic workplace happenings that make good material, but also a little because (unlike my last workplace) some of what goes on here makes the news, so it's that little bit harder to anonymise things.

I haven't yet introduced my team, though, so we'll start with Rageboy. I'm still not entirely clear what his onoging role is. Since I started, he seems to act as a roaming odd-jobs man, attending lots of meetings, documenting a lot of processes he doesn't play any part in, and providing a physical presence for our team when everyone else is too busy actually working. From what I can gather, that's pretty much defined his last couple of decades within the department - when a warm body is needed to fill a role temporarily, or someone's needed to write some documentation because everyone else is too busy, Rageboy is called in.

At the moment, he's meant to be helping me reduce the number of jobs sitting in my queue. He was actually meant to start with this a month or so back, but the first obstacle was that no two requests I get are the same, so it wasn't like I could hand him a general process to follow and then just guide him through from there. I tried to sketch out a workflow for him to follow for what I considered the simple tasks, but it quickly evolved into the stuff of nightmares.

The second obstacle was that I had to teach him how to use some of the long-standing departmental systems that I haven't been shown how to use. I was a bit surprised by this.

The third was that when he sat down and looked at the queue and some of the crazy, wrongly-assigned tasks in there, the first thing he noticed was that because of how the service desk tool has been configured we can also see jobs we had a hand in, but have since assigned to other teams. This bugged me for a while, too, but when I checked with the system administrator it turned out that fixing the issue would cause other things to break and probably keep me from seeing any of our jobs at all. Which I'm not actually opposed to, but in principle I have to concede it's probably in everyone's best interests for me to be able to see what I'm actually meant to be working on.

So I've learnt just to mentally screen out the things I don't need to bother with, and move on. Rageboy is less phlegmatic. The presence of these other jobs was deeply offensive to him. He would read in detail what they were about, and start calling members of other teams and other team leaders to tell them how long the support tickets had been open for. He was quite thorough about it, and did a great job helping them clear up their backlog. I'm sure they were appreciative, even if in reality his contribution was limited to haranguing them until they closed the tickets just to keep him quiet.

I think the types of questions that were being legitimately referred to us broke him a little bit, though, because he studiously avoided having anything to do with them.

Now, a month later, he's begun tackling some of those very old items. I'm pleased to see the old jobs slowly being whittled away while I deal with the incoming stuff, and it's a little bit validating to see someone else growing frustrated with some of the stuff that keeps being assigned to us because other support teams don't want to have to deal with it (claiming your team doesn't have the resources to follow something up seems to have become a catch-all solution for assigning work to other under-resourced teams who aren't even responsible for that kind of work to begin with).

What's less helpful is his approach. He's not a quiet man on the phone, nor a subtle one. Like Ted, he's good at identifying - loudly and angrily - what's not working right, but much less good at proposing a constructive solution. His opening gambit tends to start: "Hi, this is Rageboy. I'm assisting a colleague, and I just wanted to check in with this request THAT'S BEEN OPEN FOR ABOUT THREE MONTHS NOW to see whether it's been resolved BECAUSE IT WAS CREATED THREE MONTHS AGO and that just seems like SUCH A LONG TIME."

Three months is a long time, and I'm not happy to have things sitting so long, either. Most of the really old items are ones I inherited, or that were lobbed into the queue before I had enough knowledge about the place to know what I could safely throw back. However, I've also read every one of those old items, and have a fair idea of which ones were real issues needing resolved and which ones were just open-ended wishlists that were a lower priority than the steady influx of new items.

I'd be bothered less by Rageboy's tactlessness if I wasn't still in my probation period during a time of mass layoffs. Maybe if I explain to him gently that if I go, he inherits everything...?

Don't push that button.

There is panic. A project manager (about whom who I'd like to write more fully once I work  out how to make their project less identifiable) comes rushing in. I'm not entirely surprised to learn they've managed to associate themselves with the Samophlange.

"Quickly!" they demand of my manager, "how secure is the Samophlange? Who has the codes to activate it? And who can get access to the codes?"

"It should just be [me]*," and he gestures in my direction. "Is that right?"

I check. "Well, I have access... and so do you. And so do at least a dozen other people, too."

"Oh my god!" panics the project manager. "Can you cancel their access? You need to cancel their access! Now! Right away! No-one can ever access those codes!"

My manager looks puzzled. "What?"

"It's the Samophlange. We mustn't activate it. Ever.  Our systems can't support it. If we turn it on, it will overload everything!"

It turns out the Samophlange, like any true luxury item, is something that it's important to own, but is far too valuable to actually use.

---

* It occurs to me belatedly that I should come up with an alias for myself in all this. "Argh" was just something I picked out of general frustration at having to come up with a username when I created the blog.

The CIO and The Samophlange

I imagine the conversation between young Mephistopheles from the Very Large Software Company and our CIO went something like this:

Mephistopheles: Behold! The Samophlange!

CIO: What does it do?

Mephistopheles: Whatever you can dream of and more!

CIO: But ... the cost. Surely it must be priceless beyond the reckoning of mortal man?

Mephistopheles: Not so! Why for a mere pittance over a million gold coins, it can be yours!

CIO: ... oh. [his face falls]

Mephistopheles: However! I have spoken to my dark master and he has agreed  to let you have the most wondrous Samophlange for a mere pittance under a million gold coins if you buy it ere the cock crows three days hence. Buy now and save more!

CIO: OH MY GOD I MUST HAVE IT NOW!

A couple of days later this translates into me and another staff member going over the various figures and strategic requirements around the Samophlange. I'm looking at what we already own and have invested substantial amounts in, and can't really see what the Samophlange will add. They're looking at how much the Samophlange costs and where the magic numbers are coming from to make up the substantial wad of cash our CIO appears to believe we have on hand in the dying days of the financial year.

We keep returning to a fairly exhaustive and authoritative review of the Samophlange carried out earlier in the year, and which has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance in the last few days. Its verdict? We don't need it and can't afford it.

A senior manager wanders by to see how we're going.

"We just can't see how it's worthwhile."

"It's a great deal," he says.

"Well, maybe," I reply, "if we were actually going to use the Samophlange to its full capacity, but we won't be able to do that for at least another couple of years."

"No no. You don't understand. It's A Great Deal."

We can practically hear the capitalisation falling into place as he speaks.

"Ah. It's officially A Great Deal, then?"

"Yes. The CIO has decided."

"Well. That's my part done, then." I look at my colleague. "Good luck finding the cash."

"Oh Jesus..."

And now we own a Samophlange.

Signs of life.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster (lots of strangers screaming, no brakes or steering, an inherent risk of catastrophic failure and sudden death, and the near-certainty that somebody's going to puke on someone else), hence the lack of any updates.

The new job has what I'd consider more than its fair share of problems (although I'm hoping at some point they'll evolve into something amusing), and there have been ongoing medical problems to deal with at home at the same time. Fortunately I have my sunny disposition and positive outlook on life to see me through.

I'm not dead, and haven't stealthily relocated the site elsewhere. But it might be just a little while yet before I start posting semi-regularly again. Or even close to what used to constitute "regularly".

Also, I've been drinking. Arrrrrrr...

No time yet for nerves, but...

I start my new job in five days. At this late stage, I find it interesting that I still haven't been informed exactly where or when my new employers would like me to turn up on Monday morning.

"Interesting" in the "may you live in interesting times" sense, that is.

Oh dear.

Slappable clients: best of breed?

Our clients bewilder me sometimes. Not because they don't seem terribly bright, or even because they're paid decent money to work here. No, it's more a general bewilderment that they're even able to find their way here each day without getting lost or somehow maiming themselves en route.

I have one at the moment who's submitted repeated requests over the last couple of days to have a free upgrade to some very expensive software that he's not actually entitled to. This has been explained to him when his requests have been returned to him, along with a quote for the actual cost of the software he's asked for if that's really what he'd like us to order. He's cancelled each returned request out of hand because he doesn't feel he should have to part with any funds, and then resubmitted exactly the same request. The only changes he's made have been increasingly pompous complaints about the delay and how he's very important and needs it urgently.

The breakthrough came this afternoon when I sent him a lengthy detailed email explaining to him (again) exactly why his previous requests couldn't be processed, why he needs to actually buy the software he's demanding, and outlining exactly what software he's currently entitled to and any related upgrades attached to those. He picks a bit of software only tenuously related to the one he's been demanding for free.

"Yes! Yes, that is exactly the one I want! You've already made me lose a couple of days, so please install it immediately!"

Because it was so very clearly our fault for somehow compelling him to keep ordering the wrong thing and for failing to divine his true purpose...

Housekeeping

Things are a bit hectic right now. Not just because of the impending new job and the rush to get things finished, but because of more planning retreats (there's a story to be told there), management decisions (likewise), Stress Fiend madness (always) and, more seriously, family illness that's leaving me a bit ragged at the moment while I try to juggle everything at once.

Without wishing to blight  my chances of moving to a sane and rational workplace, I can offer this much reassurance to anyone worrying I'll run out of material: this blog came into existence when I moved into a near-identical role in a near-identical government department.

How strong the resemblance turns out to be remains to be seen ... but one of my predecessors here was one of the project managers back on good old Project Death Spiral in the very early days of Blunt Trauma.

A modern Library of Alexandra it's not...

We recently endured another morale-boosting, all-of-division meeting where everyone is herded into a function room at an isolated location and made to sit through two hours of Powerpoint presentations explaining why we're all happy and, indeed, can only become happier as we're given more work with fewer resources increasing number of challenges a greater array of opportunities allowing us to show our true greatness.

Internal communication and documenting things people need to know are two or our great weaknesses. They've been consistently identified as such for as long as I've been here, by everyone from senior management down to primitive single-cell organisms like Ted E. We're now on to at least the third project I can recall that's meant to address this, and Gimli stumps up to the podium and peers over the top to announce the latest milestone.

"Sharepoint!" He announces triumphantly. "It's here, it's live, and you should all be using it!"

On the one hand this isn't new. We've been hearing "Sharepoint is coming!" for so long now even the dim-witted northerners from Game Of Thrones would have grown weary at the repetition. On the other, the fact that it's live and has (apparently) been available for use for some time was a minor revelation for everyone gathered.

"This is what it looks like!"

Gimli, like his Powerpoint presentations, talks in short! emphatic! points! and he clicks through to a couple of screenshots so we can marvel at it. He has to use screenshots because, having gone off-site - waaay off-site - for this meeting, we don't have a reliable and secure network connection to the live system to let him actually show it to us.

"You can upload photos of yourself!"

- click -

"You can update your staff profile, and list all your skills! This will let other staff can badger you directly about things! Rather than going through the proper channels that will let you have some pretense of control over your workload!"

(Okay, I may have expanded on one of his points a little there...)

- click -

"Sharepoint! It's live! Use it!"

That was a month ago. I've checked into it periodically in the hope that something has happened to make it useful, as there's a pressing need in my team for someplace to store documentation that isn't The Morass. Sadly, no. At this point it's only an unsuccessful and ugly attempt to imitate Facebook in the belief that this will somehow make work fun. I'm expecting some subtle vandalism to start creeping in on people's profile pages before too much longer.

But at least it provides a fresh to that age-old question: "What if we built a social network and nobody came?"

The previous answer, of course, being "Google +".

I don't think a glib title can cover this.

It's been an exciting couple of weeks. We finally received permission to advertise outside our organisation for someone to replace Ted so we could stop operating in perpetual crisis mode after two years. Then our director, after approving the ad and allowing it to run, got a bad case of cold feet and decided to put the whole thing on hold without actually seeing fit to mention this to The Invertebrate, who only found out when HR called him to ask him what he'd like to do about the applications already received.

The Invertebrate took a couple of days to calm down, and then broke the news to me and the Stress Fiend: "... and he's decided he wants to review how we work to see if we can get by without that extra person."

The Stress Fiend snarled and frothed bile. I was a little more phlegmatic and, honestly, I really can't say it came as a particular surprise. I was unhappy enough to cast my periodic job-search a little wider than usual and followed up possibilities a little more thoroughly and, in a brilliant stroke of timing, now have a new job that I start in a few weeks. The Invertebrate is both stressed and pleased; stressed for obvious reasons, but pleased for me (and he seems entirely genuine in this) and with the timing, coming as it does as pretty much a direct reply to the director's decision to make life harder for us than it already was.

(I should note that I think a review is a actually a good thing, but the time to do it was two years ago when Ted announced his departure plans, not now when everyone in the team has been worn ragged. On the other hand, I'm also deeply cynical about the outcome of the review and suspect that any answer other than "No, they don't need another staff member" will be strongly unwelcome).

But that's all by way of providing some context. Since it was confirmed last week I'd be leaving, the Stress Fiend has started to become even more obviously deranged. This morning was a kind of Stress Fiend tour de force.

She opened the day with the traditional rant about the corporate GMail account, how she misses Lotus Notes, and how much she hates anything new that's been introduced in the last twelve months. Nothing out of the ordinary. But then a workmate passed through and somehow set her off on a rant about prisoners, the injustice of them having actual rights, and the many hedonistic pleasures they enjoy in their luxurious, all-expenses-paid accommodation.

There was a brief lull where she paused her diatribe long enough to vapourise the irony-meter by stating loudly and angrily that ""if you do nothing but sit and bitch and complain all the time, no wonder you're never happy."

I don't know who this was directed at. She's like an AM talkback station given human form and turned loose in the world.

Leaving that odd interruption aside, from prisoners it was only a short journey to how the real problem is those infamous "kids today". And, naturally, their parents. And a lack of respect for other people and themselves. The Stress Fiend is only a few years older than me, but sometimes - most times - it's like working alongside an angry and addled octogenarian who wishes time could have been frozen in the golden age of their teenage years (when, presumably, they were the Kids Today, but a better class of Kids Today. They just don't make Kids Today like they used to in the old days.)

Then her capacity for any kind of sustained thought seemed to break down again, and first she began addressing the air: "We made jelly on the weekend. And now we need to make some more. We love jelly. Mmm. Jelly. Jelly! Jel-ly! Jellyjellyjelly ... mwahhh!"

And then she sat making wookie noises at her computer before going to buy some Pepsi so she could come back and rant about how awful it is (the taste having failed to alter mysteriously since she last drank some a few days ago) and how the Coke filling the drinks cabinet but which she chose not to have tastes so much better in every way.

(To be fair, there was some method to her madness in this case: she's trying to drink all the Pepsi so that the manager of another team who consumes it regularly and often will run out and get angry at the people responsible for keeping the fridge stocked.)

The rest of the day passed in a kind of  blur for me as I tried to switch off higher brain functions and lose myself in documenting stuff so the remnants of my team have some idea of what I do all day other than try to cling to my sanity.

Alternative medicines

It's a week with a Monday in it, and in accordance with ancient tradition the Stress Fiend called in sick on Monday, citing a bad experience with seafood. Then she called in sick on Tuesday, prompting our admin assistant to comment "You'd think she'd have learnt to leave the prawns alone after the first night."

(Sadly, knowing the way the Stress Fiend works, I could all too easily imagine her doing exactly that: "Stupid seafood, making me violently ill! I'll show it who's in charge here! I'LL EAT IT ALL!")

Today she's finally back. It's possible (if unlikely) she did the same maths as me and realised that as of yesterday she'd achieved an impressive absenteeism rate of 20% for the year so far, but more than likely it's because a third day off would have required a medical certificate.

My cynicism is running a bit high at the moment, so it's possible she was still genuinely under the weather when she shuffled in late this morning, speaking softly and wearily. If that's the case, though, then there may be a therapeutic use for Stress Fiend Bile, as once she started raging at client emails and service desk jobs all traces of illness and frailty just fell away.

(Of course so did reason and sanity, but any new treatment has some inevitable side effects).

Beyond collateral damage

The Stress Fiend is once again sitting on requests out of spite. Except, and this is the bit that's likely to come back and bite her, she's holding things up to spite the technician handling the job and the actual client simply has the misfortune to be collateral damage without even the flimsiest pretext of justification.

Unless, that is, you count the fact the tech has asked her a perfectly reasonable question that she doesn't know the answer to, in which case it's clearly his fault.

Willful stupidity

"I know there are better ways of sharing this information than in elaborately hand-crafted HTML files that need to be constantly and painstakingly updated, but this is the only way I get to practice my web skills."

I really don't know what's worse: thinking the Stress Fiend works the way she does because she's incapable of coping with change, or knowing that she deliberately chooses the path of most resistance because it satisfies some obscure personal impulse.

Filling the vacant clown shoes

It's a Monday, and that can only mean one thing: another long weekend for the Stress Fiend! Presumably she just couldn't wait until this Friday, which she's already applied to have off. Although, to be fair, it's been a whole three weeks since her last Monday off, and before that it was a full week and a half since she decided to spontaneously extend her weekend by two days. And we haven't had a public holiday in, oh, nearly a fortnight, so I can certainly see how the poor dear might be feeling a bit overwrought and in need of a break again.

In other news, though, we're finally advertising externally for someone to fill Ted E.'s position after many bumblingly inept and inevitably doomed attempts to fill it internally. Of course it's also been advertised in typically over-blown and excessively-detailed fashion, so no-one's actually going to want to apply for a job that (apparently) demands so much and pays so little, so whether anyone actually applies for it remains to be seen.

No sooner had the ad been placed, however, than the Stress Fiend began fretting about the kind of person who might apply.

"What if we get someone useless?"

"More useless than Ted or La Mondaine?" Politeness dictates I not remind her that La Mondaine was all her fault. "The bar's been set pretty low. If they're capable of stringing a coherent application together in the first place, that already puts them well ahead of what we've had in the past."

"What if - and I know I'm being silly here - but what if..." and suddenly we reach the real source of her fear "What if they're better than me?"

And this isn't an unreasonable fear. It's why the Stress Fiend likes to operate in secrecy, and to obscure her tracks with crazed and arbitrary work practices. It's also why, a couple of years ago, the Stress Fiend allied herself with Ted against me and the one efficient, useful team member we've ever had - they were a threat, because not only could they do the Stress Fiend's job more effectively in half the time, they could see exactly what she was up to.

Fortunately for the Stress Fiend, the Invertebrate has already caved into her anxieties and allowed her to be on the selection panel, giving her ample opportunity to ensure we add yet another mutant to the organisational gene pool.

Yay.

Living in a different reality

The Stress Fiend has barely stopped talking for the last two hours.

The disturbing thing about this is that only about fifteen minutes of that time has actually been spent talking to another person, and ten of those were spent torturing me by telling all about the show she watched last night about people who believe in government conspiracies about aliens. All the rest, or at least the parts I've been unable to tune out, have been spent arguing with emails (which would almost make a bit of sense if she had some kind dictation software installed, but she doesn't), muttering angrily and inarticulately in response to largely unseen stimuli, and occasionally cackling vindictively and swearing vengeance on unidentified clients or workmates. Sometimes she'll repeat information to herself in a strange, sing-song voice as she works.

In an earlier age, she'd have been burnt as a witch or chained to the walls of a madhouse.

This isn't really that unusual, I suppose, but my Stress Fiend Tolerance Threshold seems to have been a bit low lately.

The Stress Fiend Code

What she says: "Oh, yes, that's a trap for young players."

(One of her most often-used and annoying stock phrases, incidentally.)

What she means: "Oh, yes, that's something else I don't document and don't pass on to the people who actually need to know it in order to do their job."

Self-awareness: too much to hope for.

The Stress Fiend, in between arguing with the talk-back radio she's listening to on her headphones, erupts with a fresh round of invective.

"Why do we have such f***ing stupid people working here?" she demands, before getting down to the serious business of troubleshooting software she doesn't understand on a computer she doesn't really know how to use when at best she'll only duplicate the client's problem. Instead of, for instance, redirecting the issue to the vendor's technical support as she stridently demands everyone do rather than ask us to fix it for them.

Why do we have such f***ing stupid people working here?

Why indeed...

Filthy techs

One of the roaming techs has been cleaning up their workspace and comes trundling past us with a trolley full of "borrowed" goods that he's returning to their rightful owners. All he has for us is a CD, however:

"You guys got any tissues? I've had this in my mouth. How about some disinfectant, too? Oh, and maybe some hand sanitiser?"

I really don't want this disc back anymore.

2012: starting as they mean to continue

The Stress Fiend celebrates the start of a new year at work by sending a cheery email at the last minute to announce she's decided to have an extra day off and isn't coming back yet. It only came as half a surprise, though - I was expecting her to call in sick, seeing as it's a virtual Monday.

I've no idea if she cleared this with The Invertebrate or not, because he's in the middle of a month off. I have a job offer on the table at the moment, so their sense of timing is making the decision a little less complicated than it might otherwise be.