Some context

And while I'm being unmotivated, here's how The Invertebrate earned his name.

There was a process change I was trying to implement last year while I was Acting Team Leader.  It made my role easier, it made the role of the person placing purchase orders easier, it addressed some of the horrible legacy issues we're suffering with inventory and accounts, had no impact on the clients, and no impact on Ted E.'s job.

Naturally he fought it tooth and nail, because "That's not how we used to do it".  In fact it was ... kind of.  It hadn't been done properly or consistently, but it was being done.  Ted E. dug his heels in further, claiming there was a four-year-old written process explaining how it should be done, and that, by god, was how we should be doing it.

(When I finally found this apparent Holy Grail of business processes - it was carefully hidden - it turned out to be a poorly written scrawl by Ted E. about he handles a superficially similar situation that wasn't remotely applicable).

We went ahead with the change anyway ("It doesn't affect me and I don't like it" didn't cut it as a valid objection) and began phasing it in, letting natural attrition cycle out the older models.  Then The Invertebrate was appointed, and Ted E. ramped up his "It's not how we did it in the old days" spiel and turned it into a major drama production at the next team meeting. Fortunately he'd telegraphed what he was up to, so I had time to prepare my arguments (again) for why the change was useful and necessary and had no impact on Ted E.

The team meeting went reasonably well as a result: Ted E. blustered, waved his printed copy of his process, and stabbed his notepad with his biro while loudly declaring "We have a process!"  The Invertebrate wavered towards my suggestion, agreed that he could see the value and the sense in it, and seemed surprised and relieved that I had no problem with Ted E.'s process when it was applied to the appropriate situation.  Ted E. got louder and more hysterical.

The next day, The Invertebrate complained to another team member about having to make a decision.  "They both dug their heels in.  If one of them doesn't back down I'll have to decide what to do."  Which didn't earn him a lot of sympathy: he's the team leader, so his job is to make decisions based on what he thinks is in the interests of the team's ability to perform its role, not on the basis of which of his team members proves the most pigheaded.

I wrote a four-page business case outling my suggestion, it's pros and cons, implementations, risks, etc.  Ted E. continued the "I don't like it, it's not like the old days" diatribe and circulated the same copy of his irrelevant half-page how-to instructions.  Two of the team members were strongly in favour of the change, one was happy with it, and only actively opposed it.

The Invertebrate procrastinated.

 

After several weeks, he sent an email from home announcing his decision. He prefaced his verdict by stating that he understood the team was polarised on this issue (where "polarised" = "everyone affected is in favour; the one person unaffected is fanatically opposed"), and that the best solution was to make no decision at all for a few more months until the position I've been acting in on a series of fixed-term contracts was filled on an ongoing basis. At which point ... I don't know, maybe the successful applicant would make the problem go away by agreeing with everything Ted E. said to avoid further outbursts of middle-aged male hysterics.

Up until this point the Team Leader had struck me as wavering and very uncertain of his job and what it entailed.  Taking over a month to produce an email of such spinelessness and unwillingness to make a decision that might anger the psychopath-in-residence put this well beyond simple wavering and indecision, and so "The Invertebrate" was born. 

And I think even The Invertebrate had reservations about his decisions to make no decision: the email's security settings were set so high that it couldn't be replied to, forwarded, copied, printed or, well, anything really, except read.

And screen-captured, naturally.

But that, ladies and gentlemen, was the point where I decided that even if I applied successfully for my job of the last three years, there was simply no way I could continue working under the Invertebrate.

Crossing the line between cynicism and bitterness

*sigh*

Definition of wasting time: developing criteria to use to sort out one of the many ungodly and undocumented processes in our systems here, which Ted E. will oppose on principle because:

1. it's change;
2. it's not how we did things in the old days (which is only half-true - this was done in the old days, but inconsistently and poorly);
3. "I'm concerned we're creating more work for ourselves" (trans. "This means that work I've been trying to make for other people and then blame them for not doing it the way I think it should be done will come back to me to look after and I'll f**k it up";
4. his parents didn't beat him enough as a child.

And the Invertebrate will side with him because:

1. he won't understand the distinctions I'm trying to make (this is a contractual agreement - this is off-the-shelf inventory);
2. Ted E. explains things in simple terms that he can understand. They're also overly-simplistic terms that miss 75% of the salient points, but that's incidental;
3. he doesn't want to make a decision until the senior procurement role is filled, because then someone else will magically make the problem go away for him, presumably by agreeing with everything Ted E. says;
   
4. his parents let him eat too many lead paint chips when he was young.

The burden of history

"Dear software vendor,

"We have some of your highly-specialised and no-doubt-horribly-expensive software installed here, and we're pretty sure someone in the organisation bought it at some point in the past, only we can't find any record of who or when.

"We've also lost the installation media for it although, to be honest, I can't find any record of us ever having received any to begin with (that whole 'cannot find any purchase records'  thing I mentioned). But we must have got it from somewhere and, you know, if we had a CD for it that's almost the same as having a valid licence.

"So would you mind sending me some replacement media? I'm not totally convinced you should, but the previous Team Leader left large, noisy footprints over any internal correspondence related to it, so now everyone believes we ran the whole process and have all the answers even if we don't have the CDs, purchase records, contact details for the business or, well, anything really.

"Regards etc..."

The Slug Trail of Culpability

He had to wait until it was (possibly) my last month here, but he's finally done it: Ted E. has been in tampering with the database again, deleting records, creating and selling phantom software inventory the organisation has no entitlement to deploy ... and this time he's left his fingerprints all over everything, and not mentioned anything of what he was doing to anyone else in the team.

The beauty of it is, I wasn't even looking for any of this: I just stumbled across a couple of things that unfolded into a chain of deletions, arbitrary data editing, and no consultation with the people who were actually responsible for the stuff he was messing with.

I don't have any great hope that he'll get even a token rap over the knuckles for this, but (finally) he's left a trail that's too clear and obvious to be dismissed as simple error or miscommunication, and that he can't just bluster his way out of without digging himself deeper.  So even if I finish here in four weeks (and, oh, do I want to!), I can leave knowing I've put a serious and lasting dent in his pretensions to being an efficient and effective team player.

The Howling

I'm sure he does this on purpose. HP aren't the first company whose name he chronically mispronounces, but it's not like they're a small company, or a new company - they were around for most of last century. Yet somehow, on his planet, they're called Howlett-Packard and appear destined to remain so for eternity...

Team bonding

Despite much noise about the virtues - and indeed the necessity - of the team working together in the same area to improve communication, the Invertebrate has moved like lightning to sieze a temporarily vacant office and has holed up in there*. Without, I might add, bothering to notify the team as a whole, so half of us spent the first part of the day assuming he simply wasn't here.

---

* I think he's actually trying to hide from Ted E.  Or else he's run through the same figures I was thinking about on the weekend** and has realised we're completely unsustainable as a business unit and wants someplace private to cry, because he has to make it work.

** Yes, I really was. No, I don't have a life.

Why some people invite violence

"This is something I don't have anything to do with at all, and I don't understand why we do it this way, and don't want to hear about why we do it that way from the people it affects. But I think we should stop doing it, anyway, because I don't understand it and think there's a half-arsed shortcut we can take instead."

"Madness?"

My team are gearing up to start a fight about something that looks to be mostly our fault... We recently had our website redesigned, and there are some issues with the template and structure we were obliged to use, and now it seems the help desk has been instructed to forward any client complaints about this directly to us.

So the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate are already up in arms at us being held accountable for design decisions that weren't ours to make when I field another call complaining about the eccentric order we've listed stuff in.

I make the mistake of trying to investigate: is this something we can fix, as I suspect it is? Well, yes ... apparently it is. In fact the crazy sequence has been manually configured by the Stress Fiend according to criteria or her own devising ("I'll list things in the order that I think people will know it by, rather than consistently or by its published name").

But we're not going to fix this. Of course not.

No, instead we're going to blame this, too, on the design team and rant angrily and irrationally. We'll also blame the clients, because we were trying to think like them and how dare they not think we think the way we think they think (yes, the logic really is that convoluted).

The Invertebrate has also written a terse and self-righteous email, which he's now congratulating himself on (he likes flame wars with other team leaders, particularly ones he used to have to report to. I think he has some authority issues). And he's instructed the Stress Fiend not to waste any more time correcting the mistakes we were "forced" to make.

The fact I work in the same workspace as these people should in no way be taken to mean that I endorse their madness in any whatsoever.

Oh, get a room...

Conversation between Ted E. and the Invertebrate. With footnotes longer than the actual conversation in order to accomodate all the stupidity and hypocrisy hovering around it.

Ted E.: It must be so hard for you coming into this job when there's so much that needs tidied up and put in order after all these years of things not being done properly.*

The Invertebrate: Yes, yes ... it's been difficult, and I always seem to have so much work to do, and there's just so much to learn.**

Ted E.: But we're making a lot of progress now, though. So many things are finally starting to come together now.*** May I gently sponge your fevered brow, and feed you freshly-peeled grapes, my lord?^

---

* Bizarrely, these years of neglect are the same Golden Age Ted E. likes to reminisce about, when everything was a glowing model of smooth efficiency and simplicity and Ted E. never had to engage his two brain cells because he could always find someone else to pass the problem along to.
** Because, of course, no-one could have foreseen either of those things when taking up a middle-management position in an area you have no experience in whatsoever.
*** Which has nothing to do with the Invertebrate whatsoever, and everything to do with the efforts of a single team member that Ted E. has spent months resisting, and trying to bully and undermine whenever he's thought he could get away with it.
^ Okay, I might have made that bit up.

Unfulfilled ambitions

Walking back from a meeting, and Ted E. reminisces about his childhood for no readily apparent reason: "Did you ever used to tie cotton around the legs of blowflies? That always used to be fun..."

So much becomes clear about his behaviour: he's obviously a frustrated serial killer too shiftless and lazy to ever have moved beyond torturing insects and co-workers.

One more time, with pictures.

Ted E. is having something explained to him for the nth time. The hyper-efficient team member is painstakingly showing him the process for doing something he's constantly complaining about, but stubbornly refuses to learn.

Ted E: "Oh, I'll need to get someone to write this down. It's all very complicated."

Hyper-Efficient Team Member: "I emailed you the workflow last week."

Ted E: "Really?"

Hyper-Efficient Team Member: "Yes. It was the one with all the pictures in it."

Me: [loud snort of laughter quickly turned into a cough]

Hyper-Efficient Team Member: "Oh. Or maybe I sent you the one without pictures by mistake..."

Which is uttered in a tone of such innocent apology that it becomes impossible for me to stay at my desk any longer.

Introducing the semi-functional illiterates

Ted E. is puzzled. He's been sending emails to an automated system rather than the staff who run the automated system, and one of them has finally emailed him back to tell him what he's doing, and why it won't get the kind of results he's hoping for.

They very kindly cc'ed the email to my entire group, which is why I now get to snigger at Ted E.'s expense.

But, as I say, he's puzzled ... and he's had to ask The Invertebrate if he understands what it means. And, if he does, can he please read it again to Ted E. and explain it as he goes.

"Must possess good communication skills..."

The Invertebrate: "It would be good to be able to do this in one foul swoop."

Professionalism: it's overrated anyway...

Paraphrasing ensues.

Email from Ted E. to me personally, cc'ed to the team in general:

1. Is the incomplete, inaccurate, and incoherent form email I cobbled together from copy-and-paste when I wasn't making lolspeak look like Shakespeare okay to send out to clients?
2. Shall we change how we do something I don't like doing and want to find lazy shortcuts for, when none of the reasons we do it this way have changed?
3. Where is the 2009 information for this? I've looked everywhere and it's not there, and no-one tells me anything.
4. Is there anything else I need to know about for 2009?

My reply (to Ted E. and team):

1. No, it wasn't client-friendly, was missing vital information, and looked like it had been plagiarised by the proverbial village idiot with a word-processor. I've written an English-language version that we'll use instead;
2. No, moron;
3. They're exactly in all the places you claimed you looked, and have been for several weeks (thank you Netware Info properties tab). Here are the paths in order to assist your meagre comprehension;
4. I don't know, is there?

I admit, I was greatly attempted to simply refer all these to the Invertebrate and let him agonise about the answers until he could find a car in need of repair ... but if Ted E. thought they were important enough to email to everyone, the least I could do was graciously accept the opportunity to beat him in public.

Creeping cynicism

After a hard morning trying to rewrite someone else's email, the Invertebrate has taken it upon himself to look after my division's transportation and maintenance needs instead. Rather than let the transport people do what they're paid to do and take care of organising spare tyres and replacement fuel caps, the Invertebrate is spending the afternoon zipping about the place buying the parts and delivering them personally.

I'm sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with having no background or experience in the area he's supposed to be managing.

Selling out?

I'm tossing up whether to enable Adsense on this page. Not because I'm particularly money-hungry (although free money is always nice) or because I feel a driving need to irritate people visiting the site.

No, it's because having seen Googe's context-sensitive ads in action, I'm morbidly curious to discover what they'd begin trying to sell people based on the content of my posts.

A quick update

We've reached the point again where I'm feeling mildly guilty about not having updated for a while and figure I should at least make a pretence of keeping this blog alive.

There are a couple of reasons for the silence. One is the ongoing onslaught of Ted E.'s shiftless stupidity has long since passed the point where I can easily make fun of it anymore, and the other has been the destabilising effect of getting a new Team Leader - which means, obviously, that I didn't get that job. If I did, we'd probably still be destabilised (well, Ted E. would, anyway), but at least I'd know why and I'd have some idea of where we were going from here.

I can't actually say I'm disappointed at not being Team Leader. What sane man would regret being denied the unbounded joy of micro-managing Ted E. and the Stress Fiend on a daily basis? Nor can I honestly say that the new Team Leader (henceforth dubbed The Invertebrate, for reasons that will become clear in future posts) doesn't deserve Ted E. as an underling.

So because I'm not feeling particularly bitter about coming a close second for the job*, I'll content myself with saying only this much about the Invertebrate for now:

When you have the complexion and charisma of a freshly-risen zombie, and no background or experience in the field you're now responsible for managing, you'd want a pretty impressive set of transferable skills and management experience to compensate, and the feedback from the interview panel was that he displayed these in abundance.

On paper.

We're hoping (with diminishing optimism) that eventually he'll reveal some of these qualities in his day-to-day performance but, nearly two months into his reign, he's still keeping his brilliance in check. Perhaps he's saving himself for a big start to 2009.

I could ask him, of course, but he's only been at work about half the time since he was appointed.

---

* However I'm very pissed off about some of the reasoning that went into it.

The surprise of surprise

I know I shouldn't be, but I'm surprised that Ted E. is surprised to discover the reason something isn't working is because he's doing it wrong.

His self-righteous rant is just starting to gather momentum when he actually looks at what he's complaining about.

"Oh. It's my fault."

Tact

Well if Ted E. didn't realise I'm being interviewed for the team leader position he (deservedly) didn't even get shortlisted for, he certainly knows now after the Stress Fiend loudly asked well within hearing "So what time is your interview? Do you know who's on the panel?"

He's now sitting stubbornly in the corner not wanting to talk to anyone.

Contains paraphrasing

Ted E. (recirculating an old email to the group to show us how on the ball he is):

"There are 15 pending requests that are all someone else's fault."

Me (replying to the group rather than directly to Ted, because I have no patience left to be professional about this):

"You've just recycled a two-week-old email without checking any of the data. The current figures are different, and a third of the requests are things you handle or had a direct hand in, and should know the answer to better than the rest of us."

Simple pleasures

Ah, how I love the look of sullen bewilderment on Ted E.'s face when he strolls in at 10 minutes past his boasted starting time and sees me sitting here already...

Application for the position of Team Leader, Purgatory

They finally advertised the ongoing position of Team Leader here, and they've held interviews. Now I'm just waiting to see what the outcome is.

What I didn't expect was to hear that Ted E. had applied for the job.

I was good, though. I didn't laugh uproariously at the idea (although it was close) and I think I managed to close off the "wtf?!?" expression on my face before it had time to take hold.

I'm not quite as stunned as I'd have been if he'd also reached the interview stage, but I'm still staggered at the sheer force of his self-delusion. I know he doesn't even understand the very basic jobs he avoids doing during the course of a normal working day, and therefore doesn't grasp that on his best days his performance is mediocre ... but to assume he could leap four position levels and take on licence and contract management, team management, budgeting, and HR functions.

Wow.

What colour is the sky on his planet? And he won't even understand why didn't get to the interview stage. No, he'll take it as further confirmation that no-one recognises his worth...

There's a time for democracy, and this isn't it.

"I just wanted to bring up people changing mail folders around and renaming them," says Ted E. as he produces a list of mail folders. "If you're going to make these kind of changes, then can we discuss them first at a meeting?"

Trouble is ... the folders in question have been there for at least a year, and I'm pretty sure some of them predate my time here entirely. So I'm not sure who he thinks created these and began moving them about.

And the solution... dear god!

Why would I want to hold a meeting to discuss the structure and filing of the group inbox with the very people who've actively helped make it into the Grand Abomination it is now?

Note that Ted E. and the Stress Fiend haven't suggested a meeting to discuss general principles or priorities, or how we should approach things in an Age of Reason. No. They've seriously proposed that the entire team sits down as a group and negotiates how and where 835Mb of "historical" email (read "irrelevant junk we'll never throw out because that would require a decision") should be filed.

Updates!

A sudden rash of updates has taken place, going back to (I think) the 2nd of July. Just thought I'd mention that here and save you having to work all the way back one at a time.

Pincer movements

I've been caught between a stupid client incapable of making even a token effort at helping themselves ("Give someone information that will let them solve my problem? Why would I want to do that?") and Ted E. ("I'll fix it all up for you, right up to the point where I realise I don't understand what I'm doing. Then I'll make it someone else's problem, and not tell anyone.")

The ideal solution is one where they destroy one another, but I'm not sure that's actually achievable with the resources at hand.

Still, having had Ted E. pass this to me without warning, there was some satisfaction to be had from reminding him that he was the last one to have been involved with this, and asking him how far along he'd got with it.

In some cases, careless talk costs nothing.

Faux pas for the day: discussing staffing levels within the unit, and gesturing at Ted E.'s vacant desk with the comment "...someone in that position pulling their weight" just as Ted ambles back in from lunch.

Oops.

But not a terribly sincere "Oops", I fear.

A Ted E. triptych - watch the patience diminish

Ah, Ted E. ... how it amuses me when you try to make other people's lives difficult (because, as we all know, that's the key to masking deficiencies in your own performance) and manage a 75% failure rate in doing so ...

A little later.

Having said that, I'm still not convinced that simply putting out a hit on Ted E. wouldn't be the most elegant solution for all concerned.

... and later still.
And, while I'm on a roll, what the hell is the point of asking everyone else but me the kind of questions that I'm the only one in the position to make a decision on?

I mean the former acting team leader of the remote desktop support group? I like the guy and thought he did a good job in his acting role ... but what is the frikking point of enlisting his support for a half-arsed idea that's outside his area of expertise and responsibility?

Ted E. vs The Environment

Some licence has been taken with the following conversation. But not a lot.

Manager: Now, Ted, what we're doing is installing a small client on each machine to monitor how much power it draws, so we can get some metrics on how much power we can save by using policies that power down all the computers over the weekend.

Ted: It's not my fault! I have a laptop, and I undock it at the end of each day and put it in the cupboard!*

Manager: I know, but we're just gathering some data so we can extrapolate some figures.

Ted: Laptop! Unplug! Not my fault!

Manager: We're not worried about how much power you're consuming personally, just how much we can potentially -

Ted: It's not me! Other people leave their computers on all the time, but not me!

Manager: *sigh* Ted, I'm just going to install this, okay? It won't do anything at all if you're computer's not - "

Ted E.: NOOOO! Not "if" - "WHEN". Other people BAD - Ted GOOD!

Manager: Okay, that's done. Oops, look at the time! Gotta run!

---

* Ted E. and the laptop ... where to begin? Let's not, and just write it off as one of those management vision things. But I will just say that watching Ted E. grapple with the laptop dock for the first few weeks was a regular afternoon highlight.

And the outcome is...

Meeting went broadly as expected, with Ted E. deciding the best way to defend himself was to attack anyone and everything else in sight and insist "I disagree strongly" because, y'know, that by itself invalidates anything anyone else might have to say.

I'm slightly disappointed by the ouctome of the meeting, because I'd have liked more fireworks, but at least he's now been formally asked to lift his act in a couple of areas and knows what's expected of him. The other meeting we probably need to have - about his treatment of other team members - will have to wait a little for now.

Ted E's facial tic was back, though, albeit not quite so extreme as during last week's team meeting. Again, it's satisfying to see that he's feeling some pressure.

And, coming up soon, we have the Stress Fiend to manage...

Against the forces of stupidity.

Meeting with Ted E. and my manager sometime within the next few minutes as a follow-up to Ted's antics from last week. Would have taken him aside myself, but he decided to raise the stakes by escalating things to management when (from his position) they should still have been mild and manageable. I think we'd have gotten to this point eventually, but Ted E. very helpfully got us there much faster with his injured innocence act.

Power corrupts?

I drew immense and guilt-free satisfaction from watching a never-before-seen nervous tic in Ted E.'s face dance madly throughout this morning's team meeting, especially as we drew closer to subjects he's feeling defensive about right now. Maybe he's finally starting to realise he's pushed his luck that little bit too far lately with his games.

I'm enjoying his discomfiture far too much, though, and suspect I might be straying a bit too close to wanting to make him squirm for its own sake. Luckily only the guilty have anything to fear...

Exercise

Time for a walk - Ted E. is trying to be helpful, and I just want to kill him on principle.

Relative values

Dear god... a recent staff satisfaction survey across the larger area I'm a part of yielded such awful results that the powers that be are touring each individual team to discuss personally what things are making people unhappy.

Ted E.'s complaint that he plans to bring up?* That he's been here six years and isn't getting paid more for doing work that's more in line with the payscale below him than the one he's actually on.

And somehow I don't think he finds that objectionable for the same reasons I do...

---

* Apart from me, of course. I don't think he's quite stupid enough to announce that ahead of time in front of me.

One of life's little mysteries

Why did we buy Ted E. a laptop again, anyway? I think this must have been one of those "vision" things, where the goal was to give Software Services extra mobility. But it's not like Ted E. is ever going to take a laptop home with him to put in a few extra hours, nor is it even likely that he's got any kind of work that even lends itself to that. Which only really leaves letting him roam to other campuses to meet other staff, and why in god's name would you want to let Ted E. out without adult supervision?

There's no reward for being healthy

On the way to work: text message from reliable, friendly team member telling me she won't be able to make it in.

On arrival: voicemail waiting from the Stress Fiend, telling me her partner is still dying and requires attention (after at least three days, surely they could at least hospitalise him???)

Ten minutes later: Ted E. rings in to say he's still sick and won't be in today. Laughs when he realises there's no-one else here.

A superstitious, cowardly lot.

I'm a team of one today. Further proof that it's not actually possible for me to be too cynical or pessimistic about my workplace.

One person is legitimately unwell and may well (against both our better judgments) struggle in later today - I deliberately didn't tell them about Ted E. and the Stress Fiend being off today); after having last Friday off, Ted E. spent much of yesterday foreshadowing being off today with a cold (in fairness, he was producing a lot of mucus yesterday, but it's so hard not to be cynical about his motives at the best of times); and the Stress Fiend is away a second day looking after her ill husband, who never seems to get sick in anything less than two-day increments. And again, a high degree of cynicism tends to creep into my views on the Stress Fiend's absence rates.

What's compounding my distrust of some of my teams motives is that Ted E. and the Stress Fiend were both supposed to sit down together yesterday and work through a process that one of them doesn't want to look after, and the other doesn't want to hand over.

Not exactly funny, but...

Team meeting, only the second since I officially became acting team leader ... and I think I scared Ted E. when he pushed his luck just that little bit too far by trying to slip a barefaced lie past me. The problem (for him) was that he sent two versions of the same email to different people in the team last week. The one he sent to his teammates irritated them enough; the one he sent to me and my manager ... well, let's not go into it.

But in the meeting today he tried to claim he'd never said one of the things he'd said in the email to me (versus what he'd said to the others). Which I knew was a lie - it was only the truth by the most generous of technicalities - and then he repeatedly tried to say he'd never said that.

What happened next wasn't a glorious moment for either of us but, on the bright side, it could have been a lot worse. I didn't break a chair over his head, for instance. After the third or fourth denial, I was on my feet heading for my computer where his email was still on screen: "Look, don't make me read out what you wrote. If you sent different emails to the rest of the group, that's your problem. But don't tell me you didn't write that!"

Ted E. finally seemed to realise he'd crossed a line (the look on his face was a pretty close approximation of a dinosaur looking at an oncoming asteroid and thinking"Hey, waitaminute..."), and suddenly stopped pressing his claim. He's been very agreeable and compliant since then, too, because that's probably the first time anyone in a team leader role has spoken to him like that. I think I may have scared the absolute hell out of him, so that's got to be worth something...

Professionalism is...

... not calling a f***wit a f***wit.

The pain of being civil.

Replying to Ted E.'s emails always makes me disproportionately cross, because when responding to his poorly written bouts of badly-concealed petulance (we're not paying you what you're worth? Well aren't you the lucky one!) it's probably bad form for me as Team Leader to simply tell him to grow up and stop being a f****wit.

He has a remarkable talent for being able to undermine any valid points he makes by a) assuming that it's all about him, and b) drowning them in childishness.

"... it's the only way to be sure."

Oh dear. Ted E. wants to have a weekly team meeting purely for the purposes of discussing emails that have or haven't been answered, and to discuss email filing procedures.

If I kill him now, perhaps I can prevent the madness from spreading.

Unfiltered reality

I've lost my desensitisation to the Stress Fiend's work habits. Long exposure to the Cow-orker had largely inoculated me against the worst of the Stress Fiend's antics, but a new team member is finding them difficult to deal with and I've been forced to view the Stress Fiend without any sanity filters in place.

The horror.

The horror.

Getting in touch with his inner schoolteacher

Ted E. has left a printout, covered in the trademarked half-essay in red ink that he uses when he feels a pressing need to claim the moral high ground and establishes his credentials as The Only One Who Takes His Job Seriously*.

And it's not his automatic assumption that someone else must have made a mistake because he doesn't understand it which makes me want to beat him about the head.

It's not even the fact that he could have found the correct answer to fairly easily himself, or even that the Stress Fiend told him the answer but he wouldn't believe it. (Although, thinking about it, that does seem like a compelling reason for violence.)

No, it's the childish way he feels the urge to triple underline points he's particularly emphatic and equally mistaken about, and draw giant exclamation marks to highlight what he sees as the folly and incompetence of his workmates.

Sadly, as team leader, I'm not even able to respond to him in kind because (as will be familiar to any oldest child reading this) "I'm older - or, technically, more senior - and should know better."

---

* Which, from a certain perspective, is indeed the case.

Calculated insult, or something more subtle?

That has to be deliberate - the Stress Fiend has just spent the last ten minutes exploding about uncooperative clients and unhelpful suppliers, so Ted E. decides this is clearly the perfect time to begin a slow, laborious, and somewhat patronising lecture (and, honestly, it's hard to imagine anything more offensive than being patronised by Ted E.) explaining how she's been missing something important in our job queue and that it's really quite simple if you know where to look.

This should be a recipe for the kind of homicide that would make Freddy Kreuger wake up at night screaming ... but something peculiar is happening.

The Stress Fiend actually seems to have calmed. Has her brain just shut down in self-defense, or does Ted E.'s droning monotone hit one of those strange frequencies believed to render people docile and compliant? Could there really be some method to his mendacity?

From the private archives: Why Ted E. must die

From earlier this year:

Okay. Over the last year the unit has been whittled down to four staff - three operational, one project/planning oriented. The last casual left a month ago because she got a better offer (i.e. it didn't involve working with Ted E.) and at the moment the Stress Fiend (one of the operational staff) is on leave, so it's just me and Ted. Except Ted flexed one day off last week, and called in sick yesterday. There are a lot of reasons I want to beat him about the head with a stout wooden chair at the moment (many of which can be distilled down to "Just because it's him"), but the one at the moment ... well, here's the chronology.

Last week

• Problem Client submits an order that, for some reason, fails to trigger the automatic system that should deploy his software.

This week - Tuesday

• Problem Client rings up to see what's happening with his order. In fact he rings up several times, and seems intent on filling up the voice mail;
• I speak to him to clarify a couple of things. He responds by sending more email to want to know how the clarification is going. I have to leave early that day, and I'm neck-deep in other things that are a higher priority so I don't reply;
• Ted E. can't resist sticking his nose in (multiple emails from the same problem client, no matter how small the issue, is his personal Armageddon Scenario - but only when he's confident he can make it someone else's problem or shortcoming), and a solution is arrived at. Surprisingly, he offers to put it in place;
  
• Ted E. is dropping broad and unsubtle hints that he intends to call in sick on Wednesday.

Wednesday

• Ted E. delivers;
• Problem Client leaves voice mail on Ted E.'s phone. Several times;
• I'm trying unsuccessfully to keep pace with three peoples' jobs, but have to content myself with keeping tabs on the incoming calls and monitoring the email for anything that can't wait until we actually have people here to do stuff;
• Problem Client sends more emails.

Thursday

• Ted E. returns, unfortunately having failed to die on his day off;
• Ted E. checks his voice mail. Ted E. calls the problem client and then spends the next several minutes telling the client "I can't understand why he [i.e. me] didn't take care of this for you. I was off sick yesterday, but he could have done it. I thought he was working on it. I don't know why he didn't do it, because I thought he would be taking care of it";
• this is all within my hearing - he's not even subtle about trying to pass the buck. He simply doesn't give a damn about whether he pisses off his workmates;
• then he forwards all Problem Client's voice mail - which is essentially the same message repeated over and over - to my voice mail inbox;
• and then he asks me "How is the problem client going?" to which I reply somewhat acidly "Well you were just talking to him, so you've got a better idea than I do".
  Either it goes over his head or, more likely, fails to penetrate a skull so dense that if they could reproduce it in labs, you could encase Chernobyl in it and safely build a maternity hospital on top;
• naturally he also lives in a state of happy oblivion about ever having offered to contribute to solving Problem Client's problem, and is happy to use yesterday's absence as an excuse to pass everything along to me. Because, presumably, I was meant to have taken care not only of all incoming work, but clear the backlog of outstanding tasks, too.

I'm not really given to hating people much, but if I was a casual hater Ted E. would be a Top 5 contender every time.

Slappable clients

The Stress Fiend is flummoxed. She dearly wants to savage a client, but finds herself at a loss for words (as well as getting prodded by some vague sense of self-preservation). The client's crime? Protesting that he can't possibly return some loaned equipment by yesterday:

"Hi! I just collected the [equipment] now. There is no way I can get it back to [you] by yesterday, 17 June!! I'll organise its return by courier to you tomorrow. Hopefully, you might get it back by Friday!? More likely, Monday!"

Next Monday, of course, being the 16th of June, which purists will recognise as the day traditionally held before the 17th, rather than nearly a week after. It's a small mistake, but it's one you'd expect someone to catch before firing off an indignant email.

(Meanwhile, the Stress Fiend rants for a good five minutes about how "It's ****ing idiot clients like these that waste my time and keep me from getting anything done!", successfully and entirely unknowingly fusing irony and factual accuracy.)

The forecast

I think Ted E., with his usual subtlety, has begun preparing for a sick day. It's the little clues that give it away, like muttering loudly to himself "Hmm, maybe I'll try a couple of panadol and see if that helps."

(I'm not being entirely cynical here - I've seen him do this before a couple of days in advance of having a day off).

Casting aspersions.

Ted E. makes his first serious bid to go over my head since I unofficially became the head of the unit a few weeks ago (literally everyone between me and middle management has retired or resigned since my last round of posts) by sending an email to middle management that's a call for action ... provided the action isn't his.

He's not actually pissed off at me this time, though. Rather, he's just using it as an opportunity to take random swipes at management, finger-pointing at my predecessor, have a general whine, complain that no-one listens to his complaint, and indulge in some bad grammar and spelling before a live audience.

He's special like that.

Well, that wasn't clever...

I just re-read a whole bunch of the old posts on here, and it's been a powerful demonstration of the mind's ability to blot out trauma. What sane person would keep subjecting themselves to this?

And, because he's on a roll:

There's an e-waste initiative happening at the moment (disposing of, that is, rather than generating - given my workplace, I feel that's a necessary distinction to make) and Ted E. has gotten wind of it. He rings up the coordinator and, cheerfully ignoring the parts of the notices that specify work equipment, kicks off the conversation with:

"Hi, I've got a Windows 98 computer at home. Can I bring it in and throw it out? It's got a virus."

(Note: I'm pretty confident he isn't referring to Windows 98)

Not content to rest on his laurels, however, he follows up - in all seriousness - with: "Or should I just put it into my recycle bin at home?"

Ted. E Logic

Longtime readers may recall that filing systems (and the absence or random application by drunken gibbons) are a particular bugbear of mine. Things are no different here, where the paper files are in relatively good order* but the electronic filing beggars belief, with about half of what we need to know stored in a dreadful morass on our shared server space. The previous manager (the one who went on long service a year ago never to return, and who's yet to be replaced) insisted on storing everything in perpetuity, so there's over a decade's worth of "historical" material there, amongst which current documentation and procedures wander like lost souls in limbo.

Lacking the resources and sheer drunken bravado (and hoping to cling to at least some shred of our collective will to live), a couple of us decided that rather than try to beat this monster into shape, we'd start afresh in a clean wiki, where things could be structured and tagged to make them actually useful once more. There's also a lot of stuff kept in people's heads (cheap polyester cushion stuffing in some cases) which we want to get into the wiki, too,

Anyway.

Ted E. has been haunting me since I got in this morning, searching for a process that he's sure must have been written down because he's sure he saw someone writing notes in a meeting where it was discussed several weeks ago: "I want to know this. Why didn't anyone write it down for me at the time? Why don't you remember it being discussed at the meeting you had that day you were away?"

Naturally it doesn't occur to Ted E. to write things down at meetings. His participation there tends to revolve around how management is letting him down, why we need written processes that he can then ignore, that he's tired of doing work that's above his salary level (functional literacy apparently falls into this category now) and how things were better in the olden days. He's been violently opposed to the idea of the wiki from the idea's inception, arguing that everything we need to know is in the Morass, if only someone on a higher pay level would devote their remaining life and sanity to cleaning up the electronic equivalent of Chernobyl.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh. "Perhaps" and "little" being the operative words.

Ted E. gets tired of waiting for someone to produce what he's looking for, but even he's now wary of trying to venture into the Morass for useful information. Desperation finally sends him to the wiki, where he finds the information he's after, demonstrating that despite his protestations of ignorance (and, believe me, they were more than plausible) he's actually capable of using it to find and retrieve information. Except ...

Now he's convinced that original version of the file is somewhere in the Morass, and has decided to go back and search for it there as a more trustworthy source. Presumably if he doesn't find it there, he'll it there just to avoid using the hated wiki again.

---

* So it's actually something of a shame they're largely unnecessary and duplicate information already stored in several other places.

A question I will not answer

A missive from upper management, kicking off a review of staffing and workspace requirements by asking team leaders* to identify the needs in their area. The attrition rate of staff in my area verges on the apocalyptic**, so we actually have more than enough available space for the tiny handful of us who remain. An embarrassing amount of space, in fact.

But I can't report this, because I know what the solution will be: rather than fill the vacancies (because clearly a team leader and a service manager aren't considered critical roles) the discrepancy in my area's staff/empty desk ratio will be resolved by removing our empty desks and giving the real estate to another section.

Some might say this is just cynicism speaking, but cynicism can be such an ugly word. I prefer to think of it as experience.

---

* Yes, I'm still in the unhappy role of team leader, overseeing the efforts of Ted E. and the Stress Fiend. Someday, upper management say, they may even pay me for this.

** And yet Ted E. remains, prompting fears that a post-Armageddon world will be inhabited solely by him and the cockroaches.

Go on, guess who...

That data corruption that Ted E. was so quick to shift the blame to me for? It emerged very quietly at a team meeting a couple of weeks later that someone hadn't quite grasped that when they were looking at tabular reports in a database, they were actually looking at live data ... and that blithely deleting the lines they weren't interested in, to make the report easier for them to read, might have unintended consequences.

Of course it also meant that Ted E. could then claim the reports had been fine-tuned, because they were no longer showing data he considered irrelevant.

Ted E. rides again

Oh, Ted E., you weasel ... there's been some database corruption and I can hear him, over in the corner talking to the database developer, telling her how "other people" (and he helpfully goes on to identify me specifically) use the database tables to search for and extract data that isn't accessible through the default reports are available (or, as he puts it, I "go in and change the design of the database").

"But I only ever use the reports you've given us, because I know that it's dangerous to look at the tables."

Yes, Ted E., data can be corrupted simply by looking at it. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time you ask me to find information for you that isn't available to you through the safe reports.

Fortunately, the database developer actually understands her work and, moreover, recognises when Ted E. is simply trying to pre-emptively pass blame on to someone else when it isn't even clear that there's anything to blame anyone for in the first place.

The horror... the horror

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised what my job here is. It's to fix up the things so broken and horrible that the people who actually have the information that would let them make sense of it all, don't want anything to do with it. Without, naturally, the benefit of knowing any of the things they know about the matter at hand...

It seems so obvious in hindsight, but it's taken three different tasks arriving at the same time to make me see it in that light.

From Russia, with Love?

I could try to summarise the last few months: the dramas with a workmate I shall henceforth dub The Stress Fiend, the ongoing joy of working with Ted E., strange things suppliers do that they think are helpful (a tip - if you've got a Hawaiian shirt, try hanging around random loading bays and see how much free stuff you can score), and numerous other hijinx associated with life in a poorly-funded organisation with neglected infrastructure, eccentric hiring practices, and a fondness for inventing problems before they happen while not worrying about addressing real problems before they bite...

But that's a lot of effort. So instead I'll ease back into things by making fun of the spam I've received lately.

Alena from Russia writes in "Surprise from Russia":

I am from Russia. I am 30 years. Recently I with girlfriend have climbed in the Internet and have seen this site.

Presumably climbing the internet is how people describe web-surfing in countries where it's too cold to actually surf. In fact the cold air would also explain certain aspects of the photos Alena attached to her email. Alternatively people find this site much more stimulating than I could have imagined, which makes me wonder if I should tone down my writing style somewhat.

I was on different sites, but it has liked me also I has decided to write.

Alena can has chezburger?

Ekaterina, also from Russia, writes in "I think you'll like it!":

Hello!!! My name is Ekaterina, I a 25 years old. I live in country Russia , in Chistopol city.

Never heard of Chistopol? Neither had I, but I looked it up, it's real (who says spam can't be educational?), and I can understand why Ekaterina would want to get out of there. Ekaterina has never contacted me again, so presumably these pictures of Vladimir Putin have convinced her that she needn't look abroad to find true love after all.

The Lonely Woman from Russia Anna (I kid you not, that's how she refers to herself throughout) writes in an email of the same name:

I understand that you now are surprised that to you this letter has come.

Not as surprised as I might have been if Alena and Ekaterina hadn't beaten you to the punch. These days I'm surprised when I don't get emails from Russia with love (or, at least, negotiable affection). Interestingly, Anna tells me that in Russia there are 30,000,000 women living without men. Considering that's several million more women than there are people living in Australia, that's a difficult number to conceptualise. Frankly, I'm not sure why Russia just doesn't clone Vladimir 30,000,000 times and be done with it.

Alina, also from - surprise - Russia, writes to me with "Let's have communication", although the tone of her email makes me wonder whether "communication" isn't a euphemism:

I want to get acquainted with you. I will be very glad if we will have fine dialogue ... If you wish to have dialogue with me then write to me and I shall be glad to have dialogue with you.

And, I have to admit, I was almost tempted, because who doesn't mind a good bit of dialogue now and then? But in the photos she attached (sitting at a table in a restaurant), it looks like Jack Bauer sitting at a table behind her and I don't believe in that kind of coincidence, especially given that Bauer now operates with the blessing of at least one member of the American Supreme Court. Who wants to take that kind of risk?

Meanwhile, in the attention-getting stakes:

The curiously-named u66daji fights it out with ashorty but, as attention-grabbers go, his exhortation that I should "type to clank flatulence" really isn't an incentive to open his/her message, and even after doing so I'm not quite sure what he/she was trying to sell me. ashorty's more aggressive approach ("So listen lapdog!") is, frankly, taking the hard sell to ridiculous extremes and was equally incoherent.

I'm thinking "42" might be the way to go...

"I need you to redraft this email that your minion wrote. I want it to say something different."

"Okay. What would you like it to say?"

"Something more meaningful that we can use as standard response to queries about this in future."

"Okay, but what would you like it to say?"

"Something better. Something people can understand."

"About what?"

"What your minion wrote. But different. Make it universally applicable. And concise."

"Universally applicable but concise."

"Exactly. And unambiguous, too."

Uh-huh.

So far, so good...

... to quote the captain of the Titanic.

One week down and my role as team leader has caused neither open revolt amongst my minions (although I'm keeping a close eye on Ted E.) nor catastrophic systems failure amongst the things I'm supposed to be looking after.

Or, at least, amongst the things I think I'm supposed to be looking after. Despite having several weeks where we could conduct a formal handover process, everything the outgoing manager felt I needed to know was condensed into a one-hour session where I was shown two large white folders full of emails and printouts, and proudly told "In one day's time, all this will be yours." The actual details of what I'm meant to be doing through the course of the day (or, indeed, how I'm meant to be doing it) remain vague. Given that I'm not being paid any more for supervising three minions, I'm assuming that what I'm meant to be doing is limited to "everything except anything that might mean having to pay you extra".

Ted E. has been in good form, however, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn his job satisfaction has taken a bit of a hit.

• First of all he tried to convince the outgoing manager that because he was taking over a once-a-week task that our two-days-a-week casual does, he should be able to offload most of his full-time duties onto someone else. Perhaps surprisingly, this didn't work.
  
  
• After all the stress and anguish of an office refurbishment and relocation of furniture (the outgoing manager had the well-intentioned if naive idea that everyone should be consulted about the new cube farm), we were told we needed to fit another desk in the area. Floor plans were consulted, common sense was referred to (no, really), and it was decided that Ted E.'s vast desk would need to be replaced with a normal-sized one to allow another person to sit at his end of our enclosure. A full week later, when final arrangements are being made, Ted E. announces that he's not in favour of this and tries to veto the desk-swap through sheer stubborness. Our casual, sick of endless discussions about the refurbishment, nearly had to be restrained from leaping across the intervening space and throttling him.
  In the end it was agreed that as Ted E. currently occupies twice as much floor space as anyone else, he has to be the one to lose some ground (which is exactly the same reasoning that led to the idea being proposed in the first place, but it was important to have a one hour meeting to reach this point again). Of course Ted E. had already wandered off to afternoon tea by this point (it's his usual strategy when he doesn't get his way in a meeting - slip away "to answer the phone", and then slip away a little further, etc.) so as far as he knows the idea is for us to work out a viable alternative to him being reduced to the same workspace as the rest of us. But Ted E. is the only one with an interest in doing this, and he hasn't come up with anything, so come next Monday morning he's in for an unwelcome surprise that will probably send him home early with a headache.
  
  
• "I can't find these files on the server. Where are they?"
  "Stored under the relevant supplier. Everything was really inconsistent before."
  "I don't know who the supplier is."
  [I tell him].
  "I'm just going to rename the folder so I can find this again."
  "No! We're not renaming stuff. That's how things got into a mess in the first place."
  "Can I just rename it a little bit, then, so I can recognise it next time?"
  
  
• "There's an email just come in to the shared mailbox. It's relevant to some other emails that are in there." Subtext: "I've been waiting for someone else to deal with them, and now I'm waiting for someone else to deal with this one. But I'm not going to say that out loud."
  

"Uh, is this thing on?"

Sad to say (well, only in the most masochistic, don't-want-to-disappoint-what-remains-of-my-audience kind of way) that things have been relatively sane and dull at work lately. There's only been the standard, everyday havoc going on around me and very little of the malevolent lunacy that seems to stalk me from workplace to workplace.

Of course, Ted E. was away for six weeks, which accounts for part of it...

And the more volatile of our casuals also declared about a month or so ago that she was leaving and never coming back. (Thus far she's kept her word, but her memory remains in the form of drunken dinosaur-like footprints throughout our database. Any time something occurs that makes no sense, enrages the clients, and breaks something, we can usually find her user ID stamped somewhere on the records).

So, while not exactly a Golden Age (don't make me rant about being trapped in a shared office the size of a glorified broom cupboard while half a dozen people pile in to have a meeting with my cell-mate) it's been a relatively peaceful and dull time in the old cube farm. In a grinding, shifting-goalposts/too-many-demands/not-enough-staff way, at least.

But, fear not, for good news is at hand!

It's all a bit subject to negotiation at the moment (and negotiation at my workplace tends to be conducted along the lines of upper management gloating in Bond-villain fashion while dangling you over an elaborate deathtrap), but ...

I may end up managing Ted E. (and a couple of other minions) for the rest of the year.

Accounting, Ted E.-style

One of the sources of stress for my manager over recent months has been the wild fluctuations in the money available in our sections accounts. Part of this was due to the money laundering that was taking place, and upper management helping themselves to our funds when they needed a little extra for other projects elsewhere, but both practices were more or less brought under control when upper management discovered they'd been found out.

But the fluctuations continued, and money continued to inexplicably drain away. Until yesterday...

We're looking at a new function in our tracking and purchasing system. Ted E. looks over my shoulder and points to an account number.

"That's wrong. It always keeps coming up with that number when I'm doing the accounts, and it's wrong."

Manager and 2iC look at each other. "Uh, that's our account name, Ted. It's been that for nearly eighteen months now."

"Oh, really? I've just been changing it so the money goes to these other accounts where I think it belongs."

"For eighteen months?"

"Well nobody told me..."

"Eighteen months, Ted! You thought there was a bug in the system for eighteen months and didn't say anything?"

"Welll ... it was just easier to do it this way and not tell anyone that I was siphoning money off to other accounts..."

The Learning Cliff

Manager (in search of Ted E.): "Where is he? Has he gone home already?"

Me: "Well it is ten past three..."

Manager looks at me, trying to tell if I'm joking.

"Did he tell anyone he was planning to leave early?"

Remaining workmate and I confer briefly. "Yes ... yes, he did. At about quarter to three."

"Oh. I needed to ask him about something. There's also an e-mail I needed to talk to the two of you about, following on from what we were discussing earlier ... only now I can't find it."

"It's been filed!" I pronounce ominously. Ted E. has taken to filing e-mails, using a hidden formula known only to himself and Dan Brown.

"No, it hasn't," says our manager, "That's what I thought, too, but I tried a global search and it didn't turn up."

The global search apparently doesn't encompass the "deleted" folder, because that's where I find it a few minutes later.

"Found it," I announce cheerfully.

"Where? No, don't tell me." There's a pinched look of pain on my manager's face that I haven't seen before, but which is oddly familiar from the Cow-orker workplace. "I think I need to talk to Ted E. about this in the morning."

My manager hasn't so much hit the Ted E. learning curve as smacked straight into the Ted E. cliff-face.

A pointy-haired moment

Argh.

Manager: "When I told you to contact these people, I meant 'contact these people, plus another unspecified group'. Did you read my mind, and have you heard from the unspecified group yet?"

Me: "Er... no."

Manager: "Then I think you need to get on with that urgently."

In an ideal world.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you're going to insist other parts of the organisation turn over all their activities in a particular area to your management, that you'd make sure beforehand that if you didn't already have the means of managing that task properly, you acquired it pretty damned quickly and made sure you were able to deliver on what you were promising.

You'd think...

Ted E., Man of Action

The two beliefs that drive Ted E. at work are: give the client what they want, and act immediately.

Unfortunately this tends to fall down tragically when:

1. what the client wants isn't what they need or are entitled to;
2. Ted E. doesn't understand what the client wants;
3. Ted E. doesn't actually read the client's email and acts immediately to give them what he thinks they want.

Hi-jinx ensue.

Thinking outside the box ... way outside...

Oh dear. Ted E. has been "thinking outside the box" in a bid to get out of doing work that requires engaging brain cells.

"I know doing it this way is more secure and more accurate, but can't we go for convenience instead so I don't have to spend twenty seconds looking up a database to verify confidential information?"

Data consistency is for lesser beings...

Argh. I'm glad that's over with for now.

I've just finished (I think) doing some data cleanup to fix the problem of half-a-dozen products being erroneously labeled with around 30-odd different combinations. That just sounds painful, rather than difficult, so throw in the fact that the software vendor restructured its licensing and sales model twice over that period and youll start to get an idea of how "interesting" the task turned out to be.

And then consider that the next time Ted E. goes into the database, he'll look at what I've done, decide it's too hard to understand and that consistency of data within a database is only a guideline (and a loose one at that), and begin creating new and wonderful product descriptions all over again...

Holy Wars: the Innate Superiority of The Mac

Let me just preface this by saying first that I really don't care what type of computer people use as long as it gets the job done. However...

A co-worker uses a Mac. Up until yesterday he also had to use a PC, because while his Mac could run the Microsoft Access application critical to much of our work (provided he was running a virtual Windows machine), it couldn't connect to the Oracle database that sat behind the Access front-end.

So he ran both a PC and a Mac to get around this, until yesterday when he, a tech, and a senior tech spent two hours trying to establish a connection to a database. Eventually it succeeded, but at a conservative estimate the exercise cost somewhere in the vicinity of $200 to $300. That's purely in terms of wages, and doesn't take into account the things they didn't do during that time because they were concentrating on getting one Mac to duplicate the functions of an existing Windows machine.

All good now, though? Well, no, because now he has to get Lotus Notes working properly under the virtual Windows machine, because otherwise he has to deal with the Lotus web interface and its various idiosyncrasies. But at least now he's down to using only one computer (most of the time), and after another couple of hundred dollars in salaries are consumed, he might be able to do everything he wants on his Mac.

By running all the critical systems through a virtual Windows machine.

Stupidity and The War On Me

I believe I may have to kill Ted E. shortly. The system we use here is set up with a product-prices hierarchy - that is, the database (you knew this was going to involve databases at some point, didn't you?) contains a record for a particular product, with sub-records that reflect the different models under which it can be ordered, e.g. single user, 5-user etc.

I discovered a couple of weeks back that there was a particular product suite that was proving difficult to track because Ted E. had created it as a subset of another product from the same company (a quick analogy would be listing Microsoft Office as being a subset of Microsoft Word). I tried to convince him not to do this because it wasn't just contrary to how the database is supposed to work, it's just plain wrong. But he didn't want to change it, because that requires a lot messing about to update all the records.

So I create new product entires in the database to match what the orders should be, so he can use it for future reference (he wasn't interested in trying to understand the way the products were sold, so I had to set them up myself - no big problem, because at least that way I know they're done right).

Now I find the ignorant bugger is still doing it, "because that's how I did it last time". In other words, it's more convenient for him if he keeps entering incorrect data rather than apply a little brain power - not a lot, just selecting something from a drop-down list - and do it right.

And I know when I take this to him shortly and explain again what's gone wrong, two things will happen:

• he'll react with injured innocence and repeat that he's just ordering it how it's always been ordered, and if we get the right stuff in the end, what's the harm?
• my blood pressure will soar, and I'll be fighting the urge to break office furniture over his head.

Cow-orker: the energizer bunny of stupidity

Cow-orker to an e-mail list reaching a dozen or so separate organisations:

"Hi everyone. We've received some documents under a non-disclosure agreement that we're concerned about. What do you think?"

And, sure enough, two of the three documents attached to the e-mail are clearly marked as being under NDA, not for circulation outside of vendor-controlled forums, etc.

This comes only a couple of months after she placed confidential vendor information on a publicly-accessible website because it was easier than relaying the information directly to the individuals affected by it.

The Crazy Man Revisited

Ten days ago a call went out on a closed, inter-organisational e-mail list asking for participants in a trial programme. Over the next day or two, a small handful volunteered to be guinea-pigs.

This morning the Crazy Man finally sends through his response. "Sorry for the late reply," he begins, "but I'm in a conference in Sydney and they're having trouble getting the wireless network connected..."

And the thing is - I'm not sure whether this is just a lame excuse (because even he can't pull off ten days of consecutive conference time), or if what he's making a Freudian slip and telling everyone he only replied at all because he isn't able to web-surf right now...

Cow-orker: you can lead a cow-orker to water ...

... but it's still illegal to drown them.*

"I want to send an e-mail to everyone saying they need to stop using this product and switch to products that I say are okay!"

"Wouldn't you rather just tell them they need to consider alternatives to the current product, and not get flamed by the users?"

"Um ... no, I don't think so. My way is better."

---

* From the archives.

So, yeah... I'm back.

The World of Warcraft ate my life. Sorry. Now back to the other things that eat my life, but are far less fun and can't be resolved by hitting them with a broadsword (except on a very temporary basis).

Ahhh! I kill you!

They say: "If you hit problems with this, don't spend more than a couple of hours on it. We're paying them for support we never use, so we may as well use it this time."

Two days later I say: "We don't know how to make it do this. None of the documentation even mentions it, so we don't know if it's even technically possible in the first place. Everything's on hold until we can get this resolved - can we call the company and get them to help us?"

They say: "Look it up on Google. We're not getting support in just to help you out."

I'm still here

I have a workmate. Let's call him Ted E., because he talks just like Ted E. Bare

"This is quite complex. Earlier on you were looking at something that I've now decided looked like this, so I'll give this to you to work out."

I look at it. Get a headache. Make sense of it. I take it back to Ted E. and try to explain to him why it's complex and how it can be handled. Ted E. looks pained.

"Yes ... yes... All I was trying to show you was that it was complicated. So I've been doing it this way."

"This way", unfortunately, is the wrong way and involves labelling something as something else which it clearly isn't, and then trying to treat it as such. Not surprisingly this isn't working terribly well, hence the complexity of the problem he's raised.

"Well," I try to begin, "perhaps what we need to do is start by calling this what it is, and then building on that."

Ted E. looks confused. "But I've been doing it this way." (For some reason I begin getting flashbacks to Spinal Tap and their speakers that go up to 11.)

"That's what I'm saying. Maybe we need to look at doing it a different way that's a better reflection of what it actually is."

"That's why I was trying to show you how complicated it is, and why this is what I've been doing with it."

Let's try again. "It is complicated, which is why I think we need to consider doing it differently and treating it as something that's distinct from what it's been treated as so far."

Pause. Ted E. frowns slightly. "But this is what I've been doing with it."

He catches my look of pained frustration and misinterprets it completely. "It is very complicated, like I showed you. How about you go away for a while and think about the best way to tackle it?"

It's like wrestling with a giant sponge - as soon as I get tired of applying any pressure, he springs back into his original shape.

Not dead yet.

No, I'm not dead. Yes, I've been slack. But things have been happening, and I've been persistently unwell (over it now), and it's possible I may soon be leaving for Cow-orker free pastures once again (like I haven't tried that one before).

For the last few months I've been working two jobs - one, wrangling the Cow-orker; the other, doing similar work (minus Cow-orker wrangling) at another organisation. My week's been split in half between the two, which has limited my exposure to the Cow-orker. It also means that my working week now very clearly has a sane part, and a crazed, irrational part where my day is dominated by the Cow-orker and the Crazy Man. If I didn't know better, I'd swear someone was trying to conduct bizarre psychology experiments on me.

In fact I don't know better. Hmm...

Anyway, the two jobs situation looks set to end shortly (unless the Crazy Man pulls something bizarre and HR-related from someplace unthinkable) and in the near future I'll almost certainly be moving full-time to the sane workplace. It has its own quirks, to be sure, but there are no prominent Cow-orkers, Project Managers, or sequels to Project Death Spiral lurking in the offing. All I need for them to do now is to work out quite what they want me to do there on an ongoing basis. And then, of course, make sure it's an ongoing basis and not just something that wil evaporate at the end of the year.

But what this means is that once again (ha-hah) I'm facing the prospect of having dramatically less to post here.

This hasn't been helped by the fact that the Cow-orker herself has actually gone slightly sane. No, really. She's just separated from The Spouse, and the lack of mutual insanity at home seems to have made her slightly more rational at work. Slightly. And there are signs that it's wearing off already, so it's possible that she's going to continue her random acts of berserker stupidity in the workplace, but in different ways. But, as I've said, unless the Crazy Man acts fast to keep me there, I'm not going to be directly exposed to the madness.

So that's where things are at right now. There'll be a random smattering of updates to come as I begin ploughing through recent e-mails and catch up on things.

Cow-orker: Client torture

Hot off the phone to the dentist, the Cow-orker is wondering why a client is giving her grief for giving him instructions for installing software that can't possibly work on his computer.

I try to explain to her the reason the instructions she's given him can't possibly work on his computer: she knows he's using a Mac, yet she keeps giving him instructions for installing the software under Windows with the advice that "but this is how it works under Windows!" and is struggling to grasp why he doesn't find this helpful. Because his response ("This won't work for me because it doesn't work this way on a Mac") isn't enough of a hint.

She's dismissed him as being too much of a pain to deal with, and has gone to morning tea to de-stress from the whole situation.

Cow-orker: medical histories

The Spawn has a dental appointment after a checkup revealed it needed a vast amount of fillings. Despite The Spawn's sugar-rich diet, the Cow-orker seems surprised and has been on the phone to the dentist for the last fifteen minutes.

So far the hapless dentist has been advised that The Spawn is an "exceptionally perceptive" child, and that the dentist shouldn't make the mistake of treating the wunderkind like any normal five-year old. Apparently comforting lies are okay, however, as the Cow-orker has been telling The Spawn that having half-a-dozen fillings won't hurt and she won't feel a thing. The trouble is, she's just discovered from talking to the dentist that it will, in fact, hurt (anaesthetic needles still being needles, after all) and is trying to get the dentist to give her a way out of the situation.

Exactly how she expects this to work is unclear.

In a flashback to the memorable day when the Cow-orker told me her mother once had a tooth growing out her nose, the dentist has also been treated to an extended discussion of the Cow-orker's teeth, her family's teeth, and those of The Spouse and his whole family.

(It seems his family suffers from a hillbilly-like congenital defect that leads to broken, missing and discoloured teeth. Alternatively it could just be that they are hillbillies, and simply drink and smoke to excess and rot their teeth in their heads. Or maybe it's something to do with the aliens that have been hanging around their backyard.)

Eventually the phone call reaches its point. I think. It seems that the Cow-orker is less concerned with The Spawn's dental welfare than with establishing a plan of attack for when The Spawn realises Mummy & Daddy lied about the dentist not hurting. The plan she's aiming for is to have the dentist accept all the blame for the lies.

Cow-orker: suffer the children

"Ohmygod ohmygod! The Spawn got in trouble at school for the same thing she did last week! What's wrong with this misbegotten child?"

And she leaps onto the phone to ring around her family and mobilise them so they can all unite in condemnation of The Spawn and impress on her what an awful child she is for acting like a five-year-old rather than the child prodigy she's supposed to be. (Because there's nothing like a consolidated effort at scarring a child for life to encourage good behaviour).

[And in the middle of all this, the Secondary Cow-orker is telling me all about her latest mobile phone plan and why she chose it. My eardrums are under siege from all sides.]

Listening to the Cow-orker bewailing having given birth to the Antichrist, it becomes very clear that she's actually scared of the hyper-intelligent Spawn and is frightened of having to deal with a childish temper tantrum.

You just know The Spawn is going to grow up to be a serial killer.

Marketing strike again

"But this is terrible! All the prices we just mailed out to 7,000 new clients are wrong!"

"Why didn't you check the prices first?"

"Because this is what they were last year when we were buying them through a different supplier!"

The marketing manager then begins to panic and spin an elaborate story about how, in the past, the other supplier gave us a special price on these items at the start of each year, and maybe if the new supplier gives us the same special price that will help her cover up that she messed up majorly this time. Two problems with that, though: we didn't carry this stuff at all before last year, and the old supplier didn't do anything of the sort.

The marketing manager gibbers some more and tries to claim it's not her fault that she didn't check any of the information before she sent it out to people.

I think this may even be the first time I've actually seen someone think their way into a state of self-delusion aloud and in front of others... Even the Cow-orker tends to get by with making huge and painful leaps of Cow-orker logic inside her head.

The spirit of cooperation

I've made a partial escape from the Co-worker and am now splitting my time between my old department and working in a similar role at another department across town.

My bosses from the new department to a mailing list:

"Bootcamp poses licensing problems for all of us. Has anyone had constructive advice from Microsoft or resellers about how to approach this?"

My boss from my original department (the Crazy Man), replying to the mailing list:

"As you're probably aware JZ now works here. [Everyone: "Who?"] From his email & practical loading of 2 betas, he now possesses an iMac which can boot into 3 operating systems. VMWare costs much more than the software J's using, even after buying copies of Windows XP, so why would you bother with VMWare just get a Mac, load parallels & Bootcamp & away you go with whatever OS takes your fancy or more than one if you want. Why would you waste money on buying a PC :)"

New department bosses (scratching their heads), to me:

"WTF?"

Argh. She's been filing spam messages. I don't understand. I don't want to understand.

Cow-orker: the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy ... or something

My ex-manager was trying to get an answer (or even a grunt of acknowledgement) from a couple of workmates who are angling for a severance package. After an increasingly exasperating conversation, she gets a response ("Yes we've seen it, no we haven't responded to it") and exits in frustration.

The disgruntled aspiring retirees (both with a long history of shouting at people until they get what they want) begin complaining loudly about having been harassed, humiliated and bullied. The Cow-orker steps in to set the story straight and put them in their place.

Later that day the Cow-orker visits our ex-manager to let her know how things went. "And then I stood up for you and told them that you weren't bullying them, you were being condescending and patronising. Why are you looking at me like that?"

The Cow-orker then runs away to the Crazy Man to complain about our ex-manager's ingratitude. And now she's complaining to me about how our ex-manager is behaving unreasonably by being upset just because she went and threw petrol onto the bonfire of disgruntlement.

Cow-orker: delayed response

Yesterday

Cow-orker: "I don't understand what you did with this in 2004. Do you remember?"
Me: "No, that was two years ago. But I kept the relevant e-mails in the central file."

Today

Cow-orker: "This thing I asked you about yesterday... I don't understand what you did with this in 2004. Did you keep any e-mails?"

With friends like, er, me...

Have persuaded a friend to apply for the Token Human's job (that was formerly the Cow-orker's job before she came back and took my job - if the organisational incest continues at this rate we should see our first crop of cubicle hillbillies any week now).

Anyway. I felt vaguely guilty about encouraging him to put in an application, so I sent him the URL for the old site. This didn't deter him.

Maybe he thinks I was exaggerating.

Muah hah hah...

Cow-orker: Actually slightly worrying

My god. The Spawn is home sick, left in the care of The Spouse. But The Spouse was asleep when the Cow-orker left this morning, and is still asleep now. I know this because the five-year-old Spawn keeps calling its mother to let her know what it's doing, and that Daddy is still sleeping. The Spawn has tried to wake The Spouse up, but keeps getting told to go away and let him sleep.

If the Cow-orker seems concerned that her Spawn is effectively at home alone and unsupervised, she's hiding it remarkably well.

---

Later:
That's a relief (in more ways than one) - she's left early so she can go home to The Spawn.

Cow-orker: taking the Manson Defense

"I'm going to have to ring this client and stir them," says the person who gets mortally offended when clients get unhappy with her, "It's in my nature."

I'm pretty sure serial killers use that defense, too.

Cow-orker: To Boldly Go...

This is a strange and unique experience in pain. The Cow-orker is away for the next couple of days and I'm using the opportunity to tidy up the work instruction documentation for this section.

I'm now charting the dangerous waters of a 70-page document, around of half of which was originally written by me, and all of which has since been subject to extensive Cow-orker updating and reformatting.

God, this is making my head hurt so much. Not just the pidgin English, but the fact that just inserting a line break between paragraphs can cause half the document to spontaneously reformat itself. Clearly her gift for database design extends to word-processing...

Cow-orker: Let Sleeping Wildebeest Lie

It's strangely quiet. Then a strange snuffling, grunting sound breaks the silence - the Cow-orker has fallen asleep at her desk.

Hah! One mighty snort and she frightens herself awake, looking around frantically to see if anyone noticed!

Hahahahaha...

Presumably she's crashing here from too many sleepless nights at home, waiting for The Spouse to come inside from videotaping the alien flyovers and trying to record her while she's asleep.

I can now back him up on one thing, however - she does snore.

Cow-orker: The Truth Is Out There

The Cow-orker was woken again by The Spouse in the small hours of the morning with more video camera antics. This time he was out in the back yard screaming wildly about becoming a millionaire.

Because, you see, he'd just spent the last hour filming UFOs.

And he'd drunk half a carton of beer, which presumably went some way to explaining why the Cow-orker wasn't quite able to share his vision of translating footage of strange lights in the sky near a military airbase into instant wealth.

Yee-hah.

Cow-orker: miscellany

"Oh, I didn't tell you about this, did I?"

"Actually you did."

"Oh. Well, I'm going to tell you all about it all over again."

(What she's telling me is the reason behind her decision to switch the brand of recordable CDs she's been using).

No, strangely, I'm not making any progress on this, because some retard keeps interrupting me to talk about everything else that crosses their mind.

"I just sent an email to W***** to set up a meeting. I also asked him blah blah blah..."

Gah! I know you sent him an email, because you cc'ed me. You don't need to read the whole thing aloud to me again!

Cow-orker: plotting & scheming?

Joy. I've just had the fallout from another bout of "moral obligation" hysteria fall in my lap.

I think she's also finally gotten wind of the restructure I proposed for her area and is trying to get rid of me now. She found a position going at another department 100 miles inland and up in mountains and thinks I should apply for it:

"Not sure how you'd get there tho since its at ********* :) but mooving wouldn't be as much of an issue."

Note the mooving, by the way.

Because we're special...

An anouncement from the office of the second-highest ranking official across our entire organisation:

[Our Dept.] ARCHIEVES COMPLAINCE WITH HEWRRs FOR 2006.

It gets better. When I pointed it out to the Cow-orker and said how special it made me feel, she replied with:

Did you know that if you take and AWA now that [the Dept.] could decide that when it expries they can't afford to renegotiate with you and you revert back to Little Johnnie's so called safety net of 5 minimum conditions for employment?

While I'm having some trouble making sense of this, I'm reasonably sure she missed my point entirely.

Cow-orker: please vote me off the island

Impending renovations and staffing shortages have seen me moved back to Cow-orker Land, complete with real-live Cow-orker and Perpetual Jabbering Action.

I haven't had to work in close proximity to her since late 2004. God, I'd forgotten how loud she was. I've only been dealing with her when she's been worked up or stressed about something. Rediscovering just how much background noise she generates has been an education, and I think I've already gone deaf in my left ear after only three hours' exposure to the background Cow-orker emanations.

Argh argh argh...

Cow-orker: Mathematics of fear

Recipe for terror = (Cow-orker + wireless headset) = (roaming wall of sound effect + incipient deafness).

Cow-orker: Resistance is useless!

My old manager is in damage control mode now, as the Cow-orker descended on one of our support sections and began invoking "moral obligation" and telling them it was essential they begin immediately supporting something which hasn't even been agreed to yet. This is her version of "Shock and Awe".

Her human target apparently responded with something less than blind enthusiasm and total submission to her will. The Cow-orker assumes that he's being deliberately unhelpful in not wanting to embrace a half-arsed solution to a problem that hasn't yet been defined.

"Well I don't see any reason why you can't do this!"

At this point, common sense might suggest to a normal individual that this is because she has no understanding of what the helpdesk actually does. In her case, however, common sense gets shouted down by Cow-orker Sense which dictates that because she once worked in the forerunner to this area for a few months sometime last century (until they couldn't take anymore, the wimps!) she knows exactly what they can or can't do now.

End result: an unhappy, morally indignant and still-fuming Cow-orker, and an aggreived support area wondering what they did to anger the gods this time and whether it's too late to start rolling out the razor wire.

Marketing the blame

There's just something deeply satisfying about giving bad news to Marketing people...

No, the Cow-orker isn't heading back there - if that was the case they'd probably treat it as good news, as this is a different branch of Marketing (we have multiple Marketing branches - pity us). Later on, maybe, they'd start to wonder why everything seemed to be a crisis.

For the last few days I've been getting to tell Marketing variations of "Sorry, we can't do anything about the fact you sent out 10,000 advertising brochures without checking any of the facts first. The suppliers don't see how it's their problem, either, and aren't willing to sell stuff to us stuff 15% below cost to get you out of trouble."

The situation is wholely and solely Marketing's fault, and all it would have taken to avoid was a simple "Are these costs still current?" query. Instead I've gotten to witness this wonderful series of fabrications, denials and casting of blame at suppliers as the Marketing manager engages in as much butt-covering as humanly possible before things hit the fan.

And just to make it even funnier, it's also emerged that because they didn't check any details with anyone, they're partly (okay, mostly) responsible for causing potentially hundreds of clients to commit inadvertent software piracy over the last year...

Cow-orker: when the lowest common denominator keeps moving.

"You need to clarify this some more, because if it confuses me it's going to confuse the clients. You know how stupid some of them are."

"Fair enough. How are you going at simplifying those multi-page pricelists full of meaingless supplier abbreviations, unnecessary information and confusing jargon that we keep getting queries about?"

"I don't think I need to do that. If our clients aren't smart enough to read what I'm giving them, then they shouldn't be ordering from us."

[Translation: "I don't understand it and I don't want to do it."]

Cow-orker: survival tips

A couple of times a day the Cow-orker passes my office on her way to drop some paperwork at Admin. On the way back she's taken to stopping in "for a chat". For "chat" read "interrogation" - her growing paranoia about what I might or might not be working on is eroding her already childlike capacity for dealing with things on a "need to know" basis.

Preliminary results indicate that, if I see her go past, it's actually more productive for me to slip out into the back alleyway and do nothing for ten minutes than it is to remain at my desk, get trapped, and try to continue working while she takes guesses at wthat I'm working on and tells me why it can't possibly work.

Cow-orker: Silly Season continues

Cow-orker: "We can't offer support for this for clients who want to use it from home!"

Me: "You've written it into the terms and conditions on our website that we can."

Cow-orker: "Gotta go!"