Upskilling

The Stress Fiend has been honing her communications and customer service skills lately, focusing on a couple of parts of her position description in particular:

ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY WITH CLIENTS AT ALL LEVELS

Whenever someone calls her from an internal number, she won't answer her phone until she's looked the number up in the internal directory so she can see who they are. If the number isn't listed, she won't answer and just lets the phone ring out ... again, and again, and again.

If the number is listed, she'll sometimes decide arbitrarily that it's about something they're "supposed" to call us about on the general number, and will just let it ring out.

Then when she does pick up, she either explodes with so much false bonhomie that passing birds fall dead from the sky, or (if it's someone she's friendly with) snarls angrily down the phone about the stupidity of our clients.

Occasionally, for variety, she'll sneer condescendingly at a client and imply that everything is somehow their fault.

*****

"I'm sick of people always emailing me directly when they know they're supposed to send stuff to the team's general account. Move the emails into the shared Inbox so other people can act on them and reply from there? Why would I want to do that? People might find out what I'm up to if I did that!"

DEMONSTRATED GOOD CLIENT SERVICE ATTITUDE AND SKILLS

Oh, where to begin, where to begin... She's been excelling herself here, lately.

One of the annoying things our clients tend to do is ignore any of the information published on our website, or that they suspect hasn't been personally tailored for their unique situation that's just like 90% of the other requests we also get. Instead, they prefer long personal phone calls and email exchanges, where we reiterate the published information or confirm that no, the form letter they received wasn't an elaborate practical joke perpetrated at their expense.

(In fairness, I get the impression that some of the clients who've been around for a while have sound historical reasons for distrusting anything on the organisation's intranet, and as for form letters ... well, let's just say that whenever Ted laid his hands on a form letter, his unique cut-and-paste skills had all the elegance of a starving wolverine and a wounded elk, with none of the wolverine's clarity of purpose.)

In any case, the Stress Fiend erupts every time a client asks us to confirm something they've already been told, or asks us to (essentially) read aloud to them the email they've just received from us. It's frustrating, beyond a doubt, and in a sane world you could be forgiven for thinking that we'd treasure and nurture those clients who do read what we send them (or, at the very least, have them stuffed and mounted to preserve them for future generations).

But, alas, my workplace does not exist in a sane world. In fact, as should be well and truly obvious by now, it exists on some obscure plane of Hell and I've been confined here for what I can only presume were vile crimes committed in a previous life. In which case I can only hope my past self had enough fun to make it worthwhile. The bastard.

Anyway. To paraphrase:

"These idiot clients! What do they think they're doing?"

I look at what they've done. I look at what she's told them to do, and...

"They've done exactly what you told them to do?"

"Yes! Exactly! They should know by now they're supposed to do something completely different from that! Just because I told them to do it doesn't mean they should do it. Why aren't they reading my mind and doing what I want them to do instead of what I tell them to do? How can they be so f***ing stupid?"

***** 

And if that wasn't a clear enough case of someone wanting to have their Rage Cake and eat it, try this for size:

"GRAAARRRR!" she roars, looking at our job queue. "Why are there idiots not giving us the details, like the name of the person this is actually for?"

I brave the madness of the service desk queue and have a look. Sure enough, there are a whole bunch of newly-created jobs listed for "anonymous", and because they all appear to have been system-generated jobs there isn't even anyone we can contact to fill in the gaps. In fact...

"It looks like these have all been generated by those new web-forms that were put up for us a few days ago."

"They are. And these frigging idiots just aren't filling it out right!"

I have a look at the offending web forms.

"I see the problem. The form design doesn't have any place for the clients to enter any of those details."

"Oh, yeah, I know about that. But they should bloody well enter them into the 'additional information' field that's there for them!"

"Or we could just get the form redesigned so that it actually captures the information we need."

"No,  not yet. I'll give it a month and see how things go before asking them to redo the form for us."

"Oh..." Because it doesn't need a lot of foresight to guess how things are going to go. And, scant minutes later:

"And there's another one who hasn't filled everything out! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!?" 

Maintaining the rage.

The Stress Fiend likes to rant. This is the kind of physical constant the Einsteins and Hawkings of the world wish they could discover.

Every day last week, on opening our service desk queue, she'd proceed to rant about people asking us for advice on audiovisual equipment, which isn't just outside our area of expertise, it's not something that should even be getting logged to us in the first place. I assumed that the daily rants were the result of serial stupidity on the part of clients or lazy support staff.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I was a bit tired and busy last week.

It turns out it was the same job each day. And it wasn't even one that kept circulating back to us: the Stress Fiend just wasn't transferring it on to where it needed to go, preferring to erupt into outraged martyrdom every time she noticed it again.

At this point I'd only be mildly surprised to learn she goes home at the end of each day and squeezes lemon juice into her own eyes just to maintain the rage.

Giving is its own reward.

La Mondaine is convinced she performed a prodigious amount of work when she started again with us last year, moving heaven and earth to fix up hundreds of records Ted just didn't feel were worth processing properly over a period of several months. In reality, she checked just under two months' worth. I know this because I wrote the report she was working from.

But, of course, what I know and what La Mondaine chooses to believe rarely seem to occupy the same planet...

"Can you run a report, to pick up the few records I missed? I know I fixed them all up all the way back to the start of last year, but I just want to finish any I might not have caught."

Now, I know exactly how far back the original report went and how long it took her to work through it. I also know there's no point whatsoever in trying to convince her that what she thinks she's asking for isn't what she's going to get.

"Will it be hard to run a new report?" she asks breathlessly, sounding yet again as though she's on the verge of a panic attack. "Can you do that?"

"Sure."

A couple of minutes later, I hand her a 75-page printout* listing the 2,500 or so records she was convinced she'd updated but hadn't even scratched.

And, yes, some could argue that this was a waste of paper. But that would only be because they didn't get to see the way her eyes bugged out of her head.

---

* Printed double-sided, of course. I might be willing to sacrifice half a tree in the name of giving La Mondaine a heart attack, but I'm not a complete environmental vandal.

The Wages of Stupidity: not as good as the Wages of Sin, but much easier to earn.

In an effort to keep La Mondaine away from any kind of computerised system, we've been desperately trying to come up with menial grunt-work that requires no brain power and has no serious repercussions when she inevitably gets it wrong.

(And yes, it almost certainly would be easier all round to just not have her come in anymore, but that's The Invertebrate's call and, well, you know by now how well that goes...)

We're scraping the bottom of the drudgery barrel at the moment, and thought that having her remove sticky labels from some plastic storage cases before returning them to their original owners would be simple enough. Don't ask how much she's being paid to do this - just accept that by anyone's standards it's way too much.

It's a vain hope, of course, and as it quickly turns out that even this is enough to paralyse her with indecision, creating a panic vortex that quickly expands to suck in The Invertebrate and the Stress Fiend. So at least there are some pleasant karmic overtones to the whole thing.

"But what should I do with the labels?"

"Just take them off!" "Just leave them on!" urge the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate simultaneously, before the latter hastily changes his mind to agree with the Stress Fiend.

"Take them off," he confirms.

"But they're on the cases!"

"Yes, that's why we're taking them off."

(I'm briefly tempted to inflict gratuitous pedantry on them all by pointing out that their being on the case in the first place is the only thing allowing this entire conversation to even exist in the first place, but then hurriedly think better of it.)

"But they're not our cases!"

"Exactly."

"But won't they get cross if we go around removing the labels from their cases?"

"No, because they're our labels."

"Then shouldn't we take the labels off before we give the cases back?"

... and it just kind of continues from there for several more minutes in an ever-tightening spiral of madness that I won't even attempt to record.

Explaining the obvious

"That's not available to staff members."

"So how do they get it?"

"They don't - that's what 'not available' means."

Some questions should never be asked

Looking beneath the surface of anything here is a terrible idea but, sometimes, someone is foolhardy enough to do so. I'm pretty sure it's not a part of my position description but, traditionally, this tends to be me.

This time around, I've been trying to make sense of something that I've always known intuitively was a mess, but was probably a mess with some underlying pretense of method, even if it was a pretense honoured in the breach rather than the observance.

In some respects, it seems, I'm a very slow learner.

After finally acknowledging that what I was looking at was pure, unadulterated chaos, I asked the Stress Fiend if she knew how to interpret the informational entrails I was struggling with.

Variations of "Don't know", "Ted always looked after that" and "Yeah, that's always been a tricky one, that..." haven't inspired much confidence.

Life's little miracles

I marvel, some days, that the Stress Fiend doesn't simply explode from trying to contain more bile and rage than mortal frame is meant to hold.

Gone, but not forgotten.

Today is officially Ted's last day of work. He hasn't actually been here for two months, nor has he actually done any real work here for oh, about two years or so. But now he's officially gone.

Sadly, this does not mean the demons of stupidity have been exorcised, and his former workmates have been conscientious in their efforts to ensure his niche doesn't go unfilled, as a small collection of random snippets from a typical day will demonstrate:


*****

"... and then I watched Mayo's Last Dancer."

*****

Angry ranting from the Stress Fiend about clients who read the information we provide them and then act on it, trusting that the information is current and accurate when, in this case, it isn't. I concede that the clients should indeed know better than that, but blaming them for taking her at her word does seem a tad unreasonable.

*****

La Mondaine sings along with her mobile phone's ringtone. And it's just a phone ringtone - not a song or piece of actual music that's been reused for the phone. Just a multi-note tone.

I should be grateful she doesn't use the Crazy Frog, I suppose.

*****

Medical science is turned on its head by the revelation that chainsaws cause osteoarthritis. La Mondaine insists that she never suffered from it until she used a chainsaw. Why was she using a chainsaw? I'm not going to ask. Not even to find out how it was she managed to not cut her own head off in the process.

"It must have been the chainsaw. What else could it have been?"

No-one deserves this.

La Mondaine shambles into work half an hour late and immediately shares her morning's bowel difficulties with us.

...

Perhaps I should rephrase that: "shares descriptions of her morning's bowel difficulties".

Now she's racking her brains to recall the comprehensive history of everyone else in the office who's ever suffered a stomach upset, presumably with a view to tracking them all down through the course of the day to compare symptoms.

Get off of my cloud.

It's every bit as bad as I feared: after searching the web and bewildering herself with terms like "infrastructure", "online applications" and "software as a service", La Mondaine struggles at length to reduce the Cloud to something she can understand.

Eventually she finds an answer that works: "Oh, I get it - it's when you use Facebook to back-up your photos!"

But then she immediately looks confused again: "But how will that help our department with what we're doing?"

Fortunately someone else in the office has brought in a baby to show off and La Mondaine, priding herself on being wonderful with children, forgets the mysteries of the Cloud and rushes off to torment the child.

Inane and patronising baby-talk drifts over the cubicle walls, followed a few seconds later by the screams of a terrified child.

Complete Loss Of User Data

Oh. Oh, this is going to be so painful.

La Mondaine has just heard about the concept of Cloud computing for the very first time and seems to think it's something unique to our organisation because she swears she's never heard the term used anywhere else "and no-one else uses it".

Now she's trying to learn more about it by searching the web, after the Stress Fiend and I refused to try to explain it to her.

Destroying the Precious.

La Mondaine is rummaging through Ted's drawers. She says it's because she's looking for some extra copies of software she's sure he has*, but she kept burrowing well beyond that point until she found some of Ted's attempts at documentation and process management. Naturally it didn't relate to anything he did, but was about how he thought everyone else should be doing their jobs, particularly those parts that he didn't understand and didn't want to acknowledge.

La Mondaine takes it to the Stress Fiend, who casts her eye over it, laughs mockingly at points that are clearly directed at me, and then tells La Mondaine "Just bin it."

"Are you sure? Should I show it to The Invertebrate?"

"It's not worth it. Just get rid of it."

"But what if it comes back to bite me?" La Mondaine begins hyperventilating. "What if it comes back?"

She decides that rather than taking it straight to The Invertebrate, she'll take it to me instead.

Lucky me.

She hands it over with a level of anxiety beyond all proportion to the contents, as though it's a confession signed by the secret rulers of the world tying together every great conspiracy theory formulated by a desperate and paranoid internet.

I look it over. I  look at it again. The words are English, but...

... the document is pure Ted. So much so that I feel like I should be wearing lead-lined gloves and safety goggles to protect me from the malignant, self-righteous stupidity that practically radiates from the random assortment of printouts he's stapled together and extensively annotated with cryptic remarks in red ink. But that's only the supporting documentation: there's also a two-page cover document attached that's apparently meant to explain it all.

Page 1: three sections, marked "Stakeholder/s", "Current process", and "Suggested change & Why". Each heading is carefully underlined, and each section is completely blank.

Page 2 is where Ted gets down to his in-depth analysis of the matter at hand. Whatever that matter actually is: it's a little hard to tell in the absence of any identified stakeholders, objective, or context.

There's a point #3, and a point #4B, but no points 1-2, 4, or 4A. There's a Point "?" that seems to urge against updating details that other teams need to do their job. Unusually for Ted there's also punctuation, although this mostly takes the form of capitalisation that's obviously been copied from an existing document, and arbitrary use of block capitals and underlining where he appears to be indirectly shouting at either me or the Stress Fiend.

Naturally it's all written in red biro, using scrap paper salvaged from the recycling bin, giving it the look and feel of some impoverished descendant of the kind of ancient prophetic text traditionally scrawled by angry, raving madmen using their own blood and parchment made from human skin. (Moral: they don't make angry, raving madmen like they used to).

The general thrust, from what I can tell, is that we - or, specifically, Ted - shouldn't actually be asked to do anything, and should just pass all our work on to another team and let them sort it out. Although they could only sort it out by coming back to us for advice ... but then it would come back to me or the Stress Fiend to deal with, so I can see how Ted would view this as an efficient labour-saving process.

Trying to read it sequentially is just bewildering. Trying to think like Ted and read it out of sequence as a series of random points not only doesn't help, either, but threatens to induce catastrophic brain damage. Nevertheless, I've studied it long enough to safely conclude it contains nothing of any use.

La Mondaine is still hanging over my desk, eyes wide and staring, breathing in short, sharp gasps of muted terror, with  her hands extended ready to snatch it back. I move my chair carefully to place more of the desk between us.

"No, there's nothing here we need to keep. It can get tossed," I tell her.

"But surely I should show The Invertebrate?" She reaches for it expectantly. I don't offer it, as it's clear the pages exert some terrible power over the feeble-minded and La Mondaine still clings to the myth that Ted was the Keeper of Ancient And Terrible Knowledge.

"There's nothing here to show him. It's not even written in a way that would make sense to anyone except Ted."

"But what if I throw it out and it comes back to bite me?" Her hands open and close unconsciously.

"How?" It's unkind, I know, but I throw reason at her.

"What?"

"How can it possibly come back to bite you? He doesn't work here anymore, he didn't do anything with it while he was here, and - " I glance at the printouts. "It's dated June 2009! Why are we even bothering with this? It's over eighteen months old!"

"It's not, it's recent!"

"What year are we in?"

"..."

But at least she's stopped hyperventilating. In fact, she's stopped breathing at all.

"Exactly."

"But it might come back to bite me!"

I bin it. Her face is a mask of horror and, for once, it's not just due to the quarter-inch of make-up she trowels on each morning. There's almost something despairing about the way she withdraws her hands and turns back to her desk.

And then, a few minutes later, I retrieve it for posterity. Some things are such perfect examples of their type that they should be preserved for future generations.

Or, at least, for making fun of online at a later date.

---

* Teaching Ted how to duplicate CDs was a major undertaking that nearly made The Invertebrate's head explode and, for me, remains one of the highlights of The Invertebrate's learning curve with Ted. But once he mastered the art of clicking a couple of buttons, he never looked back. In fact he started mass-producing CD sets because it was less effort to keep churning them out and losing them than actually making sure loan copies were accounted for and returned.

In case of explosion ... why not try an oxygen mask?

If the last entry didn't convince you that La Mondaine shouldn't be allowed to watch the news (or leave you wondering how she manages to dress herself in the morning without hanging herself from a ceiling fan by her underwear), then this should do the trick.

Last year the Pike River coal mine in New Zealand suffered a series of explosions over several days, trapping and killing twenty-nine miners. La Mondaine, in her running day-long analysis of ... well, everything that passed before her eyes, really, began declaiming loudly that if it was one of her children in the mine, she'd be rushing down the mine right away.

Noting that the Stress Fiend appeared singularly unimpressed, and putting this down to the Stress Fiend having no children (and no interest in having children) she turned to me for support.

Yeah, I know.

"Wouldn't you do the same?" she asked, wide-eyed and breathless with the great dramatic possibilities of it all.

"No," I replied with equal parts truth and malicious desire to puncture her Heroic Parent Fantasy.

"How could you not? They're your children! I'd be in there so fast if it was my boys!"

"Because I don't know a thing about mines. Because it's two kilometres underground. And because the mine is probably filled with explosive, poisonous gas." (The mine experienced three more explosions over the next few days).

La Mondaine floundered for a few seconds. Apparently it hadn't occurred to her that there were legitimate reasons parents and loved ones weren't being permitted - and in face weren't being actively encouraged - to mount their own rescue expeditions.

Then she threw sanity overboard, and rallied to her cause.

"I'd wear an oxygen mask!"

"That wouldn't help with explosive gas."

"I'd attach an air-hose!"

- WTF? -

"Explosive  gas," I remind her. "I don't think the air hose will help much with that."

"The other end of the hose would be outside the mine. That would be safe."

(Because as everyone knows exploding gas is only a danger when inhaled. I feel, somehow, that Bill Clinton may be ultimately to blame here.)

"Two kilometres underground," emphasises the Stress Fiend. "That's a lot of hose to carry with you."

"But it would protect me from the explosive gas," she insists, lost in daydreams of braving the dark and the heat and the flames to rescue her children from Certain Death when all the world has given up on them, proving once and for all to her sons that they can't live without their mother.

"I'd do it," she says bravely, lower lip almost quivering with doomed heroism, "I'd do it for my boys."

And it probably makes me a terrible person, but it's hard not to hope that maybe, one day, she'll get the chance...

Après le déluge, La Mondaine.

With the flood cleanup in progress and likely to remain so for some considerable time to come, La Mondaine (like many) is struggling to come to grips with events.

Not that she was affected by the flooding. No, it's the television footage that's confusing her:

"... and there were all these big piles of mud - huge piles, like giant blobs of chocolate ice-cream - all lined up in a row just back from the road, and I just don't understand how they got there."

A passing tech, who spent most of last week watching his neighbourhood being excavated from beneath the silt, paused to explain that the piles were placed there by bobcat operators as part of the cleanup.

"But where did the mud come from for them to make such big blobs? When they showed you the streets nearby, there was hardly any mud at all!"

I don't know what reality La Mondaine lives in, but it seems certain it only intersects ours occasionally and I believe we should all be grateful for that.

Dreams, nightmares ... there's always some overlap

Dedicated to La Mondaine, who should never have been allowed to see Inception because she's been relentlessly driving people crazy every since wanting someone to explain the ending to her:

Taking the high ground

Naturally, with three-quarters of the state underwater, the route between my home and work remains resolutely above water and perfectly serviceable. Worse, there's no possibility that the waters will claim my workplace and wash the earth clean of its unholy taint or, at least, the last lingering traces of Ted.

On the bright side, though, the Stress Fiend is cut off and won't be joining us for a while, although for The Invertebrate's peace of mind it might have been nice if she'd contacted him or answered his phone calls to let him know this, rather than leaving him to worry she'd been swept away by the floodwaters sometime in the last twenty-four hours.

In fact there's almost no-one here, so it's unusually peaceful. Not overly productive, of course, because big chunks of our corporate infrastructure are running on skeleton staff, some parts are underwater, and half our internet link has been shut down because of flooding and power outages (with the other half possibly following if things get worse) but, as I say, "peaceful".

Oh, 2011, I hate you already...

A general plea to clients:

• please, please stop migrating from a PC to a Mac and then acting surprised when none of the Windows software you've purchased - especially the Windows-only software - is available on your new computer. Yes, there are ways of working around this, but they will cost you more money and you need to think about these things first instead of just buying something because it's shiny;
• if you're going to use multiple email addresses to contact us with queries, try checking those email accounts for replies instead of switching to a new identity and complaining that we've never gotten back to you;
• on a related that note, read your emails instead of doing whatever it is you do with them now, which I can only assume is to gaze blankly at the screen while trying to divine the desired meaning through some form of visual osmosis;
• please don't apply security settings to your emails so that it's impossible for us to reply to them directly. That's just retarded;
• stop making shit up. Seriously, just because you make up a non-existent version of Microsoft Office containing applications that have never been part of an Office suite doesn't mean it now exists. Getting offended at us because we won't provide you with MS Office Ultimate Enterprise Mega-Edition with Magical Sparkly Unicorn 2010 isn't going to make any difference and only makes everyone unhappy;
• if you don't like getting the same answer every time, either stop asking the same question or follow the advice we gave you the first time around.

Welcome to 2011

The Stress Fiend: "I'm just logging a job for this client so they don't get confused. She just needs some software reinstalled, so should I log it as a reinstallation job, or one to have her computer reimaged?"

"Just as a reinstall."

"But that's not an option."

So why are you asking me as though it is?

Q: Why do they call it the Silly Season?

A: Because Village Idiot Season confused the Village Idiots.

La Mondaine is trying to do some Christmas shopping while she works and seems surprised when the corporate intranet informs her that the website she's trying to visit is a Restricted URL and continuing may breach the organisation's Code of Conduct.

"Oh! Why did it do that?"

The website? Well, I don't know exactly where she was trying to go, but she was looking for a Playboy housecoat and it's not a big leap to work out what search terms she was using and where they were likely to take her...

Nature only abhors a vacuum because she doesn't have co-workers

Ted E. may be gone but, in a fine example of office Darwinism run amuck, La Mondaine (who, I'd like to point out, was trying to convince us earlier today against all evidence to the contrary that Ted was actually a really nice guy) rushes to fill the newly-vacant niche in the office ecology.

In other words, every village must have its idiot.

La Mondaine: "How did Ted know about this?"

Stress Fiend: "Because he'd read every email the rest of us were sending so he could tell us what we were doing wrong."

La Mondaine: "He what?"

Me: "He'd read all the sent emails."

La Mondaine: "What would he read?"

Me: "The emails."

La Mondaine: "But why would he do that?"

*****

Next up, the global economy...

"Why do we always have to follow America? Why does our housing market have to follow theirs?"

"Because they have, what, 25% of the worlds' wealth, and our markets are greedy?" offers the Stress Fiend.

"Who has the rest? Australia must have at least that much! Who has all the rest of the money?"

"Asia will have a fair bit. I think China by itself owns a lot of the US debt..." without thinking, I blunder into the madness. Even as I say it I know I'm going to regret entering the conversation - the only question is exactly how - but it's been a long, slow day and the words are out before I can stop them.

"So why can't we be more like China?"

I pause. Surely she can't ... no, wait. Yes. Yes, she is perfectly serious.

"Because they're a repressive, totalitarian regime with a terrible human rights record?"

La Mondaine opens her mouth, closes it, and blinks in surprise. Presumably this is what happens when she tries to accommodate more than one idea at a time.

Then she gives up and goes home, which is a surprise win.

A fool even Mr T would struggle to pity

While we slowly drift towards not bringing La Mondaine in anymore, we've been finding work for her that keeps her away from touching any of our systems. At the moment this means we have her tidying up our storeroom, a task so simple even ... actually, no, that's not quite right. I was going to say even Ted could do it and, on a purely theoretical basis, he probably could. In practice, he'd lose interest after five minutes and either try to palm it off on someone else or begin throwing random items into the bin in protest at being asked to think about something.

Come to think of it, that's exactly what he started doing the last time he made a fuss about the state of the storeroom and it was pointed out there was nothing stopping him from doing something about it...

Anyway, La Mondaine is fumbling and panic-attacking her way through the storeroom. Yesterday she found a batch of duplicate items that came with useless obsolete bonus material and wanted to know if she should file the useless obsolete bonus material away.

"No," I tell her, "Just get rid of it all."

"All of it?"

"Yes."

"Just get rid of it all?"

"Yes."

"The useless obsolete bonus material, you mean?"

"Yes."

"You don't want to keep any of it?"

"No. No-one here has ever used it, it's not applicable to how anyone here actually works. Hence, 'useless' and 'obsolete'."

Today she comes across more of exactly the same material.

"What should I do with this? It's the same as the stuff you told me to get rid of yesterday."

"Uh, get rid of it?"

"But it's the same as yesterday's stuff. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Not even keep one copy?"

... which is almost enough to convinces me she's just doing this to provoke me. It's not just that no-one could really be this stupid: it's because we're not even in the realm of functional stupidity anymore. This is carrying some dreadful terminal illness and subtly begging to be euthanised before quality of life becomes a serious issue.

It seems I was very bad in a past life

Oh, god. Apparently this is the week of hell. For some reason, The Invertebrate has decided to make Ted's last week an epic of suffering and woe for everyone else.

Firstly, we still haven't gotten rid of La Mondaine. It was looking promising a couple of weeks ago, but then the timing just didn't work out right and The Invertebrate lost his nerve at the last minute and we're stuck with her until at least the end of the year. In celebration of this (apparently), The Invertebrate has called a team meeting for tomorrow morning. On the plus side: no Ted. On the down side: no agenda, La Mondaine, and another hour of my life I won't get back.

(It's not vitally important to me that every hour of my life be worth something, but I do get irritable when my time is wasted by meetings that aren't actually about anything).

On Thursday, there's the team Christmas lunch. Because it's Ted's last lunch with us, both my predecessor and the previous team leader are coming along as special guests, thereby ensuring life-threateningly toxic levels of rose-tinted nostalgia and self-congratulatory trips down Memory Lane when, in reality, all three of them deserve to be pursued down Beaten-With-Sticks-For-Gross-Stupidity Lane by a stampede of angry bulls.

Oh. Joy. Apparently La Mondaine will also be in attendance.

I'm still not quite sure how I'm going to deal with this. There probably isn't enough time to have my dentist fit me with a cyanide-filled false tooth, and I'm positive there won't enough time to have him fit one to each of the Good Old Days Gang.

And as if that wasn't enough... on Friday, we have our last meeting of the year with our counterparts at other organisations, and Ted has decided he'll wander along to this, too, so he can say his farewells to a bunch of people he's studiously avoided having anything to do with because he didn't feel he was paid enough for it. Following that, the Invertebrate has decided we'll also have a farewell afternoon tea for Ted. Now, I'm good at keeping things civil and professional, but I feel this is starting to ask just a little more of me than is reasonable.

In fact with La Mondaine's announcement that now she'll have to come in Friday, too, I'm sure it is. We're entering "cruel and unusual punishment" territory here. If I was a particularly paranoid turn of mind, I think I'd have good grounds for thinking this was an elaborate, divine plot directed at me as punishment for sins in a past life ... in which case I hope my past self really had fun.

(On the bright side, though, this will almost certainly put a crimp in Ted's unspoken plans to sneak away even earlier than his normal Friday afternoon skive.)

Yes, his departure is cause for celebration. I'm not disputing that. I understand the need to make sure he's really leaving. I even understand that it's important that he be seen to be leaving so that his sudden absence won't raise questions about shallow graves, suspiciously shiney gardening tools, and alibis.

But if this is drawn out any longer it's going to rival the seventeen final scenes from The Return of The King ... without the benefit of a fast-forward control.

La Mondaine: no matter how short the countdown, it's still too long

Happily, La Mondaine is away with a headcold.  There's a certain pleasing irony in that, as yesterday she had a lengthy phone call to a friend who'd been exposed to a disease-bearing child.  La Mondaine gleefully AND VERY LOUDLY informed her friend how sick she was going to be in the very near future, how awful it would be, and how completely inevitable.  Because that's the kind of caring and supportive friend she is.

So arriving at work today to find she'd been stricken overnight was immensely satisfying for even more reasons than usual.

Yesterday she spent a great deal of time complaining about how she just doesn't understand kids today, and what's wrong with them, anyway?  In  her world, the youth of today are all on a non-stop bender and routinely glass one another in pursuit of an elusive "perpetual high".  It's not safe to walk down the city streets at night  because, seven nights a week, they'll be filled with drug-crazed youngsters chasing even more drugs and remorselessly smashing glasses and bottles into the faces of innocent bystanders.  In her day, naturally, when the world was young and innocent, people just weren't doing drugs - or if they did, they did them secretly and politely - and there was no alcohol-related violence, because people were just better then and she understood them.

The Stress Fiend then chimed in: kids today just had no respect for their elders (the word "whippersnappers" wasn't uttered, nor were there complaints about how those damn kids just wouldn't stay offa her lawn, but if they'd hung any more heavily in the air, you could have plucked them from the ether and used them as bludgeoning instruments).  Both blamed the parents for not bringing them up right.

Somehow this then segued into La Mondaine trying to use jailed drug smugglers like the Bali Nine as an example of how utterly lost and incapable of looking after themselves today's youth really.  At this point, despite myself, I felt obliged to point out that millions of teens and tweens manage to get through life without  smuggling illegal narcotics into death-penalty countries, but she couldn't grasp the concept that individual stupidity may not represent an entire generation or two.

(Which wasn't really that surprising - she, Ted and our previous team leader had a shared habit of fixating on isolated factoids devoid of any context.  This made team meetings in the old days into an absolutely excruciating experience that still sees me and the Stress Fiend flinch in pain nearly four years later whenever a team meeting is called).

"I just don't understand them, I really don't.  The worst thing my boys ever did was get a speeding ticket."  Pause.  "Oh, and one of them got a thirteen-year-old pregnant."

* stunned silence *

"But then she got pregnant again at 16, so she obviously really wanted it."

* more stunned silence *

Now, as a parent myself, I've know for quite a long time that La Mondaine's thoughts on parenting aren't worth the sputtering, threadbare and pickled synapses they dribble from at random intervals, but ... WHAT?  Her immature, dependent, judgement-impaired, financially-incapable, 13yo-impregnating offspring are an example of successful parenting?  But of course they must be, because they visit her a lot (for babysitting, washing, loans, help putting their underpants on the right way around, etc), so they're clearly far superior to today's kids with their lawless, nihilistic ways...

While that was hard to top (and I'm honestly hoping she doesn't manage to), she didn't feel it was any reason to stop talking. Instead, she switched gears and decided to argue against all the evidence that we'd miss Ted when he was gone.

When I asked, more than a little incredulously, "Why?" she began trying to convince me how hard it would be to get Ted's (eventual) replacement trained and up to speed. There was a plus side to this, however, as it gave me the opportunity to inadvertently offend her

"How will you and the Stress Fiend cope?  The job's soooo complicated!  It will take them months to get the hang of it all!" 

She very clearly wanted me to show some sign of distress or dismay.  Instead she got a non-committal shrug.

"Depends on the caliber of the person we get.  If it's someone competent, they'll pick up the basics fairly quickly."

A half-second later, the slightly frozen look on her face registers and a little voice in the back of my head adds "Oh, that's right - you're struggling.  Hmm - faux pas..."

But I have trouble feeling particularly guilty about it, especially because it meant she stopped talking at me for a while. Instead I'm wondering how to replicate the results on a regular basis while still making it appear spontaneous.

"It was too wet at playtime, so teacher said we could go home early."

It's 3.30pm, and the The Invertebrate bounces into our workspace. He was helping Ted fill in his resignation forms earlier today (which I can't help but envisage as "No, Ted, stop chewing on your crayons and make your mark here") and he's still having trouble suppressing his glee.

"I just wanted to check with you guys - " he suddenly notices Ted's missing.  "Wait, where's he gone? Has he gone home already?"

"It was raining at lunch." He gets my best deadpan face.

"So?"

"He didn't want to get wet if he went outside, so he decided that meant he had to work through lunch instead."

"He - what? That's just..."

Pain flickers across his face as he tries to reconcile Ted's sense of entitlement with anything resembling reason and, inevitably, fails.

"Argh!"

The Stress Fiend nearly falls off her chair laughing.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

Ted announced his departure date today. It didn't exactly come as a surprise, as I've overheard him talking to interstate removalists for the last couple of days and knew the decision had been reached.

But, from mid-December, he'll be several hundred miles away and it will be a Ted-free world, leaving only the Stress Fiend and La Mondaine to exalt an average working day into the realm of Cruel and Unusual Punishment.

Now I just need to work out a diplomatic means of avoiding the going-away event The Invertebrate seems determined to organise. I might be helped in this by Ted himself, who also seems to be trying to avoid going to one.

Or I could just be magnanimous, forget the last few years of white-anting and backbiting and make a genuine effort to wish him well...

No method in her madness, just more madness.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: La Mondaine caught the same bus as me into work, and wanted to chat all the way. Luckily I got onto the bus with a book already in hand, and managed to retreat into it after some basic civilities.

Avoiding her once the bus reached our destination wasn't as easy, but in the walk to the office I learnt that she isn't happy not being allowed to run loose on everything yet (partly because the Stress Fiend is a secretive control freak, but largely because none of us have any confidence in her ability not to destroy everything she touches), and that she finds the Stress Fiend incredibly stressful to work with and feels physically ill every time the Stress Fiend erupts into a tirade about a client or a colleague.

That's a lot of time to spend feeling physically ill. A lot of easily avoidable time, when she doesn't actually need the income, so she must really be desperate for a social life to keep coming into this.

Although I wouldn't rule out Mad Cow Disease, either.

The importance of routine

Monday - Tuesday: the Stress Fiend & La Mondaine complain endlessly about everything Ted E. has done incorrectly, or (more often) hasn't done at all.

Wednesday - Friday: the Stress Fiend & Ted E. complain endlessly about everything La Mondaine has done incorrectly. This usually keeps them going for all three days, as La Mondaine likes to hurtle through as much as she can without actually understanding anything that she's actually doing.

It's like The Lion King's "Circle of Life" by way of Scott Adams.

"I read all the emails to see what's happening. Except when I don't."

"Someone needs to tell me what to do with this."

"It was in the email the Invertebrate sent to us all last week."

"I didn't see one. He mustn't have sent it to me."

"It's in the shared inbox. In fact..." and I check quickly, "... it's still there now."

"Oh. I suppose I'd better print it off and read it, then."

Which he does. And then promptly attempts to blame the Stress Fiend, anyway, for not including it on the ever-growing list of things he needs to have written down for him even though (technically) their positions are an equivalent level and even though she wasn't actually here when The Invertebrate sent the email.

Cthulhu calling

The Stress Fiend is back from leave, and Ted's working week has just begun. The two of them have finished their brief show of unity in complaining about the quality of La Mondaine's work, and are settling back into the routine of  cryptic commentary and mini-rants about clients punctuated with snappish comments about random things.

("Butterflies! F***ing hate them! Graarrggh! And don't get me started on the colour of the sky!")

Ted resumes normal service first, asking "Have you seen the email from Julmwargwrmlmn?" in an absolutely breathtaking display of how to take a simple first name and render it completely unintelligible.

The Stress Fiend twitches like she's been electrocuted: "What? Where was that?", presumably wondering why we're being emailed by what sounds like one of Cthulhu's brethren. She begins scanning the shared inbox in a mild panic.

"Who was it from?"

Ted tries to help (?) by providing the surname, which he also proceeds to maul: "Sverrrrnnn..."

The Stress Fiend apparently has her Ted-to-English translation device running (or else just makes a desperately inspired guess) and manages to identify who he's talking about.

But the mystery of his linguicidal effort remains: was it deliberate? Is he on drugs (and could we even tell?) Is he having a stroke? Maybe he's been bitten by a zombie (and, again, how would we tell?).

Communication Theory

Ted, one of the most secretive and treacherous people I've ever worked with, loves to complain about a lack of communication around the office, to the point where he recently announced to the Stress Fiend and the Invertebrate (concerning me): "I hate him! I really hate him! He doesn't talk to me!"

I almost fell off my chair laughing when the Stress Fiend shared this gem. Yes, it's quite true - I don't talk to him, beyond what's necessary to get the job done. And there's an excellent reason for that: the first couple of years of trying to work with and manage Ted convinced me that talking to him was just wasted effort. He'd hear only what he wanted to hear, ignore the rest, and make things up to repeat at a later date.

He also made it abundantly clear during my first few months here (before he and I even had much to do with one another) that he didn't like me, and didn't accept that I had any right to be here when I'd taken a job that should have been his. Not that he knew what the job was, or understood anything about it. But he suspected it paid more, so clearly it should have been his by right of seniority, and that's the important point here. That kind of instant hostility isn't much of an incentive to maintain anything beyond a civil working relationship, and nothing since then has persuaded me otherwise. I tell him what he needs to know to do his job (which obviously isn't a lot), explain why things are done a particular way, and leave it at that.

Anyway. Digression.

Ted's an appalling communicator. He rarely writes anything down, and when he does it's a either a cryptic note in red pen explaining that you've done something wrong with something, but without telling you what, or it's an equally cryptic but even more unintelligible email shotgun-cc'ed at multiple recipients so you're never quite sure who it was meant for in the first place, never mind what it was meant to convey. The underlying message of most of the emails seems to be "I'm confused and I'm angry and I want someone to do something that gives me more money!"

He also doesn't tell people what he's doing, usually because if it's one of his gradually diminishing duties we might ask awkward questions (such as "Why are you doing it that way?" or "How can that possibly take you half a day?"), and if it's not one of his duties it's going to be something affecting one of the rest of us and he knows he shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Last week he wanted a particular message relayed to La Mondaine, letting her know not to proceed with something that was likely to come through this week, until some additional information was received. He could have emailed her; he could have emailed a general notice to the team in case one of the rest of us had a spare moment to act on it; he could even have written it down. Instead, as a casual aside he told the Stress Fiend to tell La Mondaine when she saw her in three days' time to leave this particular task alone.

The Stress Fiend, not surprisingly - and somewhat understandably - forgot. Or she may have made the assumption that if it was important, Ted would leave some written instructions for when he wasn't here. No, I don't know what colour the sky is on her planet, either.

So this morning Ted is stomping about the office, grumbling to The Invertebrate about the lack of communication. When The Invertebrate innocently raises the thorny question of why Ted hadn't just emailed La Mondaine instead, Ted began looking for better ways to apportion the blame, started rummaging around on the absent Stress Fiend's desk, and then grumped back to his own desk empty-handed while the puzzled Invertebrate looked on.

"What are you looking for?"
"I thought she'd have a folder."
"Of what?"
"Stuff."*

Because, as Ted loves to complain on a daily basis, people really need to write "stuff" down.

---

* Where "stuff" = "clear and unequivocal proof that, with malice aforethought, the Stress Fiend conspired with La Mondaine to not do something that subsequently meant Ted had to do a little bit of extra work"  - 20 minutes' worth, by my estimate - "when he began his working week on Wednesday."

Not a feature wall, so much as a feature *room*

Things are moving forward slowly, with Chez Ted now on the market and Ted himself making optimistic noises about being out of here in only a few weeks. Personally I have trouble making the conceptual leap required to imagine someone paying over half a million dollars for a house full of Ted cooties*, something that strikes me as only slightly less imperiling of one's sanity and immortal soul than buying a house built on an Indian burial ground.

And who knows? Maybe there's a buyer out there who shares Ted's exciting approach to interior design. He was repainting parts of the house and decided he needed some more paint from the hardware store. Instead of doing what a normal person would do and take a sample along for colour-matching, he just bought a new tin of paint in the same colour and set to.

Except that he got a little confused on the way to the hardware store. He knew the colour was named after a fruit, though, and strawberry and peach are kind of the same colour. Right?

The resulting pink room is strangely absent from the photos of his house on the real estate website.

---

* No, I don't really believe they exist ... but would you want to take the chance? I didn't think so.

Welcome to Monday

I know I tend to complain a lot about - and I'll be blunt here - all the shit I have to deal with at work. I just didn't expect that today I'd be complaining about it quite so literally thanks to a veritable mountain of fertiliser dumped conveniently near the air intakes on my side of the building.  For good measure, the pile (which easily measured 5' at its highest point) was also situated right beside the exit from the fire stairs ... that open out near my area.

As metaphors go, it wasn't exactly subtle.

The Virtual Monday Blues

Dear clients,

• if your dog has just died; and,
• if you've just had root-canal work; and,
• you're about to fly overseas and want to give a presentation developed using the expensive and esoteric piece of Windows-based software you had us buy for your work computer; and,
• you've just gone and bought yourself a new Mac laptop especially for the trip...

You may want to reconsider ringing me and expecting me to be able to solve all your problems. Because, and this my considered, professional opinion: you're f**ked, and will soon come to envy your dead dog and your zombie tooth.

(And if you really must call to recite your catalogue of woe, please present it an appropriate format - a nice, blues number by John Lee Hooker, for instance.

Freaks. All of them.

My workplace is always full of strange smells. Usually unpleasant, often chemical in origin, and only a health hazard about a third of the time. Sometimes, I'm assuming for the sake of variety, we're afflicted with various burning smells. Mostly these consist of woodsmoke from burn-offs in the nearby forest reserves, plastic containers that people have (somehow!) managed to immolate in the tea-room microwaves and, very occasionally, from workmen setting fire to things beneath the air-conditioning intakes. In fact the air-conditioning intakes seem to be a popular spot to work: just last week some workers chose that very spot to use industrial solvent to clean their paintbrushes.

Hilarity ensued, as you can imagine.

There's a peculiar odor hanging around at the moment, and it's one of Ted's days off so it's definitely not him. The Stress Fiend and La Mondaine have been discussing it at length, and La Mondaine has concluded it's the smell of burning wiring. I'm skeptical, because it was only the other week she thought her wooden computer was on fire, but she's now prowling the office and stooping to sniff all the network ports in the belief that our internet has somehow caught fire.

How many nemeses does one person need?

A manager - for the sake of a name let's call him Mr Bonehead, because I'm not feeling particularly creative with aliases right now - received an invoice and then sat on it for a fortnight before passing it through to us with only eight working days left in which to have payment authorised and processed.  Plenty of time, you might think, considering it's not a huge amount (a little over $100,000) and we live in an age of digital wonders*, but the labyrinthine approvals process and (let's be honest) some seriously  f***ed-up financial delegation levels make this a much more challenging process than could reasonably be expected. At the best of times, eight working days would be barely be adequate.

Mr Bonehead finally sent the invoice through to The Invertebrate, asking him to organise payment. The Invertebrate left it on my desk (I was away the day it arrived) with a note asking me to organise payment (at least partly, I suspect, because The Invertebrate still hasn't quite learnt how to use our systems). This is on a Friday, so suddenly we're already at the end of a working week.

The next week kicked off with everyone but me away for the first half of the week. This is less stressful than it sounds, but getting things moving doesn't happen easily. Nevertheless, I get the purchase request up to the Director's office to kick off the approval chain. It's beyond his meagre financial delegation of $50,000, but he still needs to see it before it goes to the next level of management for their approval ... except that it's also beyond their level of delegation, but they have to see it before it goes on to the level after that, where someone can finally rubber-stamp the renewal of a critical bit of IT infrastructure support.

Except that the Director is the one who has to approve the use of the particular account this is to be paid from, and even though it's been paid from this account every year since its inception, he decides that now he wants to know more about it. I provide a brief cover letter with all the relevant details I can lay my hands on, which aren't many because it turns out this particular contract has been administered with a high degree of secrecy over the years. So he sends the whole thing back down to Mr Bonehead asking him what it's about.

In the meantime, the company we're trying to pay has been ringing Mr Bonehead to see how things are going. Then they ring Finance, who also call Mr Bonehead and ask if it's okay to pay.

"Sure," he tells them. And then tells them to forward any other inquiries about it straight to me.

Finance try to pay the invoice on the say-so of someone who doesn't have the authority to approve a payment of that size or from that account, only to discover - surprise! - that there's nothing in their system they can match it against so they can proceed. At which point they email me in confusion and ask me to submit a payment request (in addition to the purchase request that's already ricocheting around somewhere in the building). I figure I may as well, because the money has to be paid and this might save us some time.

Except - there's that word again - I can't submit a payment request without a financial approver, which just starts me down exactly the same path as getting the purchase request authorised. Only this time, because that particular workflow is hardcoded to only recognise its own version of Inner Truth, our wonderful financial system won't let me pick a financial approver anywhere to whom I can send this thing.

If I drew this as a flowchart, it would probably end up stabbing itself in the head to stop the pain.

I give The Invertebrate an update on what's going on and then throw up my hands, having been effectively stymied at every turn.

A week or so later the saga rears its head again with no-one listening to a word anyone else is saying, least of all anything I might have to say.

The supplier is becoming more insistent that the invoice be paid today ("Kindly refer to our previous correspondence re. claiming firstborn in lieu of payment"), emailing and calling me constantly while simultaneously harassing our finance area ... who are also emailing and calling me constantly. Our Finance Trolls are being particularly annoying, as I've now had to repeat the same story to several different people because none of them write anything down or communicate anything to their teammates. Or maybe they do, and they just prefer to start from first principles every time. Who can tell? Their ways are not those of normal folk.

Anyway, with time running out I began chasing the Director's PA to see if they knew where the payment authorisation had gone because I certainly didn't. They did some forensic work at their end and discovered...

[Drum roll!]

... Mr Bonehead was sitting on it again. Had been, in fact, since the moment he received it from the Director asking what it was about.

Asked if he could bring it back so we could get on with paying it, he responded "Oh, but it hasn't been signed yet." So he knew payment was actually dependent on it being signed, but never thought it might be useful to send it back to someone who could sign off on something he wanted paid urgently.

After sitting on it for a fortnight at the start.

---

* Although this normally translates into people wondering how to extract their digits from various orifices.

His reputation precedes him

A tech wanders into our area: "I've got a tricky question. Who wants it?"

I point to Ted, sitting with his back to us and facing studiously into his corner.

Several minutes later we've revived the tech after he passes out from laughing too hard, and he tries again: "No, seriously..."

Kill it with fire?

"Oh, there's that burning smell again! What is it? What's on fire? Where's it coming from?"

"It's woodsmoke. From outside."

"But how do you know?"

"I was outside at lunchtime, and I could smell it then."

"But how do you know it's woodsmoke?"

"... because the air is smoky, and smells of burning wood?"

"Since when? When did this start?"

"It's been like that all day. When I left to come here this morning there was a blanket of smoke over the suburb where we both live."*

"But how can you tell it's wood?"

I'm trying to think of a polite way of not bothering to even answer this when the Stress Fiend comes to my rescue: "Because he went out into the forest and set it on fire! What do you think?"

"Oh, so it's a burn-off. Is it a burn-off? Are they having a burn-off? Where? Where can you find out?"

"I don't know." (Although actually it was more like "Hnn-nnh" accompanied by an indifferent shrug in the hope she'd leave me alone.)

"How can I be sure it's a burn-off? How do I know it's not my computer?"

I don't know. Maybe because your computer isn't made of wood?

---

* Yes, alarmingly enough that's true. Presumably for sins in a past life, La Mondaine lives only a couple of streets away from me. Since discovering that, leaving the house during daylight hours has taken on a hitherto-unknown dimension of terror.

Working with an unnecessary evil

Well, the holiday is over. It wasn't a holiday in the traditional sense - not for me, at any rate - but La Mondaine went on a cruise for a few days the week before last and came back from that (as people often seem to do) with some hideous disease that kept her away for another week.

Ah, happy times... Even the Stress Fiend admitted it was easier to get work done without her here. "I like having her around again, but it's just so much easier to get things done when I don't have to keep explaining things to her." So clearly bringing her back to cover the Ted Gap is ... well, actually, it's working quite well. Just not in the way expected by any of the people who thought it was a good idea.

For the record, I'd just like to state again that I was not one of them.

But she's back now, and in between devouring most of the Stress Fiend's morning like so:

• "How do I do this again?"
• "What was the name of that nice man who used to work in... where did he used to work again?"
• "Why don't we do it this way anymore?"
• "But don't you remember how we used to have to do it?"
• "Do you ever hear from ..." mixed with "Did you hear about..."

... she's also reminded me quite why it is I actually prefer having no-one (or even Ted) to having La Mondaine here by trying to pry extensively into my personal life.

"But aren't you stressed? Why aren't you on anti-depressants?You should be on anti-depressants!" Following which she proceeds to rattle off a string of pharmaceutical and herbal remedies she thinks I should be on because she can't imagine how she'd cope.

On the other hand I don't need to imagine how she'd cope, because I'm seeing it right now: she'd cope poorly. Very, very poorly. Her grown-up-and-left-home children have fallen into yet another crisis due to non-payment of bills and her mobile phone is ringing hot as she tries to fix things up for them. This has been a recurrent feature since her return so it's little wonder, really, that her offspring (who I'm sure can't be that much younger than me) are incapable of looking after themselves. It can only be a matter of time before one of them calls wanting to know what to do when he's exhausted all the possible ways he can wear one pair of underpants.

And if she ever has grandchildren it will be a disaster of Roland Emmerich proportions, only without the complex characterisation and intelligent plotlines. Think 2012 with the subtlety and grace of Dumb & Dumber.

Anyway, in between wittering on about the latest domestic dramas (many of which seem to revolve around the fact that she and her husband of decades still annoy one another and haven't merged into some warm, fuzzy, collective hive mind), she's also had the brilliant idea that she needs to come in for an extra day each week to work with Ted to learn all the great secrets she's convinced he holds. Which ... is really kind of mind-blowing when you think about it. She's worked with him before; she's seeing firsthand again how little he does now. Yet she still buys into the myth of Ted E. as the guardian of hidden knowledge, without which everything will fall apart.

I suspect I should probably be irritated by that (and no doubt will be at some point), and the thought of La Mondaine being here an extra day each week is certainly one that wants to make me weep ... but, on the other hand, it means she and Ted can make each other suffer directly, and on that basis I think I can put up with it for a time.

As long as I don't think about the fact we could have hired someone else.

Context Fail

I've mentioned the Stress Fiend's inability to provide any kind of context when she starts complaining about something. Here's a sample from this morning:

"Argh! This damn chick! I've had it with her! I'm going to ..."

"What's the problem?" I'm looking at our shared inbox as she mutters and there's an email she might be referring to. Or might not. It's hard to tell.

"Oh, it's this damn chick again! She just ... urgh! ... I don't know how many times I've told her ... Ooh! Shiny!"

Teaching pigs to sing would be easier.

The Stress Fiend continues trying to show La Mondaine what she's supposed to be doing.

"Now you just do this."

"I do this?"

"No, just this."

"Then this?"

"No, only this."

"Okay, then I do this?"

"No, just this."

"Oh, I get it. Then I do this?"

"No, just this."

"What about this?"

"No, only this."

... repeat for several minutes. Move on to next record.

This is why I try to leave him in his cave with the Precious.

"Hi, Gollum. We're about to go live with this software. Your team will be doing most of the support, so can you spare someone to do a couple of test install to make sure there are no unexpected tricks to it? That's all we're waiting on now."

"No! We're far too busy to check whether we're able to install something without incident! Give it to another team with fewer resources, who work in a completely different environment to test!"

This is why Gollum is loved and revered by his team: there aren't many team leaders around here willing to shield his people from learning stuff ahead of time that might be useful to them.

When the cat's away...

... well, let's face it, if mice were as retarded as Ted E. they'd play regardless of whether the cat was there or not.

Ted took advantage of me being off sick for a few days by restarting his campaign against how I've been managing recurring charging on some things.  This has come up a few times over the last twelve months or so, and several times already this year.  The last time saw The Invertebrate trapped in his office for an hour and a half trying to explain to Ted why (a) why these charges are different, and (b) why they needed to be handled differently (rather than Ted's favoured solution, which is a one-size doesn't-fit-anyone-except-maybe-Godzilla option). The Invertebrate came out thinking he'd made progress, but while we were at a meeting Ted spent the afternoon laboriously composing an email that boiled down to "I don't understand, I disagree, and here's how he can make it consistently fail to work for anyone."

This time around it was more of the same.  Instead of padding out the charging details with meaningless fluff, I've reworked the system slightly indicate the period for which the charge applied. I'm not sure quite what it is about this that bugs Ted, but bug him it very clearly is and he resumed harping while I wasn't around to shoot him down.

Then he went one further and rang my predecessor for some expert advice to bolster his case.  I won't go into all the reasons why this just beggars belief, but it was particularly funny that Ted chose this round of charging as the battleground, because it's one where my predecessor had us operating  in a massive breach of license compliance terms for several years (when I worked it out after I took over, it turns out we'd exceeded our usage by 1,667%).  I don't know what Ted actually told him, but it wouldn't really have mattered: his grasp of how our databse was actually used was only slightly less shaky than his grasp of how it needed to be used.

(And yet he was its principal designer. If you've ever wondered why I spend so much time in the background of the database repairing and modifying things, look no further for an explanation).

Not that this prevented Ted from declaring to The Invertebrate "I asked him because he knows all about how it's meant to work, and how we're supposed to be using it."  My predecessor agreed with Ted that we were definitely making too much work for ourselves, which was all the ammunition Ted needed to stroll into The Invertebrate's office to tell him we were doing things wrong, with a brief detour by the Stress Fiend to tell her:

"I've found a mentor who understands what I'm talking about and agrees with me."

Which, while almost certainly accurate from a technical point of view, didn't quite yield the results he expected.

"I lost it a little bit," The Invertebrate told me the next day, "Actually, I think I might have gone right off at him."  No "might" about it, apparently. According to the Stress Fiend, after the office door opened and Ted fled to lunch, The Invertebrate emerged looking a little sheepish, came over to her and asked:

"Uh, could you hear me yelling out here?"

Ted went home early with a headache, though, which always counts as a win.

The Invertebrate filled me in the next morning, because he'd placed it on the team meeting agenda "to get it behind us properly once and for all".  None of us were particularly looking forward to it, but being yelled at must have given even Ted a hint of where things were going because when the agenda item came around:

"No, no.  I understand now.  It all makes sense to me."

No. I don't believe it, either.

(We've all agreed this means in about two to four weeks it's going to come up again.  I estimate two, The Invertebrate leans optimistically towards four, but either way it's up to him to deal with it when it rears its stupid ugly head again, leaving me to sit quietly and listen for the yells from The Invertebrate's office. And The Invertebrate (hopefully) has learnt a valuable lesson - you need to brutalise Ted on a fairly regular basis if you want him to toe the line even temporarily.  It's not an ideal management style, but when you're not allowed to physically beat staff sometimes you just have to make do.)

Ted's ears pricked up later in the meeting when we mentioned my predecessor was coming over for a meeting this week, but appeared visibly crestfallen to learn his mentor had chosen one of Ted's official off-days for his visit.  Then he tried to find out whether my predecessor was reachable by any kind of instant-messaging client, but as Ted doesn't actually understand what instant messaging actually is, it was very easy to tell him "No, his organisation doesn't use Lotus Sametime" and watch his hopes of discrete consultation with the Master of All Things Licensing collapse.

I suspect he was destined for disappointment, anyway. The Invertebrate was still fuming about when he ran into the Mentor of Ted socially later that evening and "suggested" he not give Ted any further encouragement about how we should do things with systems my predecessor doesn't understand or have any part of.

Waste, guano, and Ted E.

We've just uncovered a hitherto unknown stroke of genius on Ted E.'s part, in his never-ending quest to save himself some work. One of Ted's tiny handful of duties is to duplicate software, label it, and distribute it to clients. Some of this software is available for both Windows and Macintosh, but very rarely on the same disc.

At some point Ted decided that having a separate label for the Windows and Mac versions fell into what he would class as "making extra work for ourselves" and simply edited the label template to make a generic label declaring the software to be "Win/Mac". After all, being able to tell the separate Windows and Mac discs apart would just be silly, right? The half-second it takes to choose one label over another - or the extravagant *handful* of seconds it would take to update the label - is clearly an unacceptable waste of corporate resources, even if, as resources go, Ted's about on par with the mined-out guano pits of Nauru.

La Mondaine is now wailing as she sorts through a pile of Ted's "Win/Mac" discs to work out which ones are which. Sadly that's not quite as funny as it sounds, but it's making the Stress Fiend suffer, too, so it's not without a positive side.

Morale not improving, beatings continuing

No, seriously, I don't know who you're talking about that used to come around all the time many years ago when you worked here and I didn't. And, really, I'm not interested in reminiscing about "the good old days" because a) they almost certainly weren't, and  b) I wasn't here then.

Also? When it's ten years old and about people who aren't here anymore? With neither point nor punchline, it's not even gossip - it's just useless trivia.

Week Two

The only way this could be more painful is, conceivably, if we cloned Ted and had Clone-Ted filling in for himself ... but I'm not actually convinced that would be the case.

La Mondaine is now badgering staff who've only been here a year over whether the daughter of a long-retired workmate is still doing the same job in an entirely different part of the organisation we almost never deal with that they were doing five years ago ... identifying the daughter, naturally, by first name only, looking puzzled when the new staff have no idea who she was talking about ("How could you not know this person?"), and leaving the new staff with the uncomfortable feeling there's a gaping hole in their understanding of the organisation.

She's still waiting to get access to all the systems she needs, so at the moment she's lurking over the Stress Fiend's shoulder being shown (again) what she'll be expected to do. Ordinarily, asking questions is a sign of a healthy mind. In this case, though, the gradually rising tone of frustration in the Stress Fiend's voice suggests otherwise.

Lambs still screaming? Check...

It's bad enough dealing with Ted E., but when I have to explain the same things to clients repeatedly I find myself wondering whether I shouldn't just resort to telling them "It puts the lotion in the basket, or it gets the hose again."


It certainly couldn't make them any more confused.

La Mondaine: week one

The first day of our

La Mondaine arrived in a state of high excitement, eager to pick up where she'd left years ago, renew old friendships, and throw herself into the exciting social whirlwind that this place is all about (instead of that tedious, pesky "work" stuff that some of us spend our day grappling with).

Thus far it's been a deeply and horrifyingly painful experience. And that's before she's even begun trying to do any work yet. God knows what kind of agony we're in for once she actually has to start engaging her brain in the present rather than just leaving it idling noisily in the past.

(On a related note, I've never been so grateful for the delay in getting someone set up with computer and network access here. It meant she grew bored watching the Stress Fiend work and left early. Technically the Stress Fiend was trying to train her in how things are done these days, but in practice it was like watching someone take their nine-month-old to see Shakespeare: grizzling, intermittent crying fits, and constantly wondering why it's not yet time for the next meal).

Firstly, La Mondaine talks constantly. She's not exceptionally loud - she certainly doesn't boom out the way the Cow-Orker could - but her voice is pitched to penetrate, makes everything sound like a question, and just. doesn't. stop. Perhaps desensitisation will come with time, but for the moment she's impossible to tune out.

And then The Invertebrate decides in an apparent burst of sadism that we'll have a team afternoon tea just so we can have a chat about where things will be going over the next few months. I'd already given this some thought, but wasn't overly surprised when our visions diverged: his, for instance, seems to be a lot lighter on the bloody axes, straitjackets and padded cells that loomed prominently in mine.

The first day went roughly as follows:

"No, that system 's been gone for years, too. The staff club and the Friday afternoon 'lunches'? Well the club's been shut for a couple of years now..."  (Coincidentally business declined as the number of hard-drinking oldtimers retired).

"Is this person still here? How about this other person? How about all the other people I wanted to come back to socialise with?"

"You mean you don't leave stuff in the Inbox forever in case someone's on holiday when the email arrives? How do they know every little thing that happened while they weren't here? You still have weekly meetings to discuss every new email that's arrived, don't you?"

By day two she was repeating back to us as "news" the very things we'd told her the day before: that certain people had left, old systems had been replaced, work practices had changed, etc.  Not that this prevented her from reacting to each new example of change with wide-eyed, breathless disbelief and a plaintive cry of "But what do you do now?" ... which was usually her response to having just been told what it was we did now.

Looking back at my increasingly desperate and angry private Tweets from Day Two, I find this:

"Please. F**k off before I have to kill you. Or myself. One of us has to go if you're going to keep this up."

Which pretty much sums up the experience: if gnawing off a limb to escape wasn't enough, and your only only way out was cutting your own head off using a pair of blunt nail scissors, you'd be begging for the opportunity.

Getting her set up with computer access also turned into another adventure in pain. To begin with it was just because it can take a while to get someone set up with all the appropriate email and network access they need.

"Who was that person who used to work here years ago, but isn't around anymore? They'd know what to do!"

Because apparently what they'd do is wave their magic wand and cause the electrons carrying La Mondaine's login details to propagate at faster-than-light speeds across all our systems, and Physics be damned.

Then we had to get her access to our primary database. I really wish we didn't. The things she's likely to do to it are the kind of things that made Skynet go bad, and while out our database might lack the capacity to start a nuclear war (as far as we know), it does have the ability to wipe all our software license records and recovering from that will make snacking on tumour-ridden mutant rats in a post-nuclear wasteland look like a picnic (albeit a picnic of two-headed, eight-eyed cancer rats). But I digress.

While one of the techs came around to configure the database client for her, she began wanting to know where the instructions were for setting up the old database. The old old database. She was here when the current incarnation was being phased in, was shown that we use a more highly-developed version of the same, and so should know the old one just doesn't exist anymore. Nevertheless, the tech clearly couldn't do his job without instructions that were nearly a decade old and unrelated to anything he'd seen in his time here.

La Mondaine disappeared into our storage room for several minutes and, somehow, emerged with a printed copy of the old instructions. Quite how she managed that ... well, bluntly, I'm f**ked if I know. I'm almost prepared to believe she brought them in from home with her but, more likely, Ted had a copy secreted away someplace in the hope that some day we'd return to the good old days.

She then tried to get access to a service desk tool that the organisation stopped using a few years before she left. More breathless surprise: "But what do you do now?" By now, even the Stress Fiend was starting to sound a little ragged. She showed La Mondaine the current service desk tool (only eight versions behind the current version and counting!) but emphasised that La Mondaine wouldn't be expected to deal with anything in there.

"But what if-"

"No. You won't need to."

"But we used to - with the old system, I used to - "

No. No, you don't touch that. Ever. I don't care what you used to do in the past, we don't work that way anymore. I will personally raze this building - this whole organisation - to the ground before I let you have access to any more systems than are strictly necessary.

So two days with La Mondaine filling in for Ted, and I think it's safe to say we've already lost all the gains in productivity - not to mention the lower stress levels - his absence has brought us.Next week the Stress Fiend hopes to turn her loose in our database, telling herself optimistically "She'll be fine once she gets all the old stuff out of her head."

And I agree with her. There's absolutely nothing there that a little trepanation wouldn't fix.

Housekeeping, grave-robbing and a bit of history.

So we're now several weeks into Ted's gentle cruise into retirement and (hopefully) out of my life. More on that eventually when I start to work through the backlog, but it hasn't actually been as bad as I'd feared.

It's worse. Oh, how it's worse.

A little over a year ago, The Invertebrate decided to let our one useful and competent team member go when their contract ran out. This was someone who could simultaneously perform both Ted's and the Stress Fiend's jobs to a higher standard than they could, and still have time to find ways to correct historical errors and fix broken processes; clearly, we just couldn't tolerate someone like that on our team especially when they did irresponsible things like recovering close to $100,000 in missing revenue.

I'm still in touch with them, and when I shared the happy news that Ted finally looked like he was moving on, they mentioned they'd be interested in some part-time work during that same period. On paper, it was a win/win situation: they get some work that suits the hours they're after, and we get someone who doesn't need to be trained from scratch, and we know we can rely on.

I broached the idea with The Invertebrate. He doesn't know about his nickname, but seems determined to defend it to the death and rejected the idea on the basis that:

• the Stress Fiend would feel threatened;
• the Stress Fiend won't give up any of the workload she can't handle, and won't relinquish control over any of it. Especially not to someone she knows will do it better;
• the Stress Fiend will be unhappy if we have someone who doesn't just see where things are broken, but actively works on coming up with and implementing solutions;
• the Stress Fiend doesn't want to work with someone more competent and capable of delivering all the changes she claims to be working on and would have had ready except someone else always finds a way to ruin things for her (curse those meddling kids!).

Instead, he's opted for Plan B: grave-robbing.

Okay, perhaps that's a little harsh. On the other hand, after the last couple of days dealing with La Mondaine, I don't feel it's entirely undeserved.

In the closing years of the last century, this organisation was a very different place. The team leader had a crazy and morale-destroying obsession with trivial details, true, but this was offset by an organisational culture that celebrated long social lunches, lunchtime drinks, crashing as many vendors' Christmas parties as possible, and so on (somewhat paradoxically, the OCD team leader led the charge on all these). It was a happier, chattier, boozier time when the boundaries between work and social life bled into one another.

Personally I'd have hated it, but I think it's fairly well-established by now that I don't socialise well with certain kinds of people. But this was the environment La Mondaine lived and breathed in her time here.

Then came The Dawn of The Ted. To La Mondaine, the arrival of Ted E. quickly turned into a struggle of Darwinian proportions, as they competed to see who could be the most obsessive about insignificant details, the most strident in demanding that every conceivable contingency be thoroughly analysed and documented ... and the most bloody inefficient at actually doing their job. La Mondaine was outclassed when it came to simple bloody-minded treachery and malfeasance, though, and eventually opted for early retirement rather than deal with Ted on a daily basis.

And yet... she couldn't bring herself to say good-bye to the poisoned social ties of the workplace. Soon she came back as one of the small horde of casuals the old team leader loved to have around, and the old battles began anew, just in time for me to start working here. The weekly team meetings with Ted, La Mondaine, the old Team Leader were nightmarishly epic three-hour affairs where the three would bicker and argue and "But what if...?" endlessly while the rest of our large and unwieldy team would break into small protective huddles to work on pet projects under cover of the storm.

(This, incidentally, is Ted's fondly-remembered Golden Age).

Eventually La Mondaine couldn't take anymore. Ted continued to outflank her by virtue of simple ambient toxicity, and after a series of increasingly explosive exchanges with the old Team Leader she resigned for a second time in a dramatic huff, and a couple of us were finally able to get on with cleaning up all the mistakes she'd made in the database.

Now, with the old Team Leader long gone and Ted ambling slowly off into the sunset, she's realised once again that she misses the social life here and that it's time to stage yet another come back.She's remained in touch with the Stress Fiend throughout, the Stress Fiend pointed her at The Invertebrate ... and the rest is history. The kind of history you'd like to see expunged from the books. The kind that makes you want to send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to perform some selective adjustments.

But more on that later. La Mondaine has returned, and within two days she's already made Ted appear ... not exactly as the lesser of two evils, but certainly the more subtle.

There's also a punchline to all of this. La Mondaine is only interested in working casually, part-time, and probably only short-term (especially as reality begins to sink in) and we still have no longer-term fix for our staffing problems.  The Invertebrate's solution is to find yet another casual that we'll need to train up from scratch, and then rotate them, La Mondaine and Ted E. through the week. If The Invertebrate deliberately set out to maximise the amount of confusion and inefficiency within the team, he couldn't have come up with a better plan.

The slow march to a better world

So ... Ted E.'s gentle glide into retirement, then.


The Invertebrate came back from his month's leave, still without a solution for dealing with Ted's switch to officially working part-time from next week. Eventually, though, he and our Associate Director put their heads together (or banged them together, if the outcome is anything to go by) to work out how best to fill the temporary half-time position.

The answer was so creatively retarded even I was surprised.

Our AD inherited a personal assistant, whose contract is up for renewal again. They've been here for around two years now, but in our organisation's finest tradition they've been strung along on a series of short-term contacts. The problem now is that there's not really enough work to fill a full-time PA role (alternatively the role just isn't being properly utilised to support other admin functions, but that doesn't appear to have been looked into).

The joint brainwave? Second someone to fill a full-time role that's half-PA/half-Ted. This is based on the presumed existence of a great untapped pool of people within the organisation who have the right combination of skills and a burning desire to take on two thankless half-time roles.  It also means the current PA will probably end up out of a job, as I doubt they'll meet whatever criteria are set for the role (on the other hand, they only have to be as competent as Ted and less personally toxic, and we'd be ahead of the game. Somehow I doubt this is an area they particularly want to work in, however). When Ted - hopefully - retires at the end of the year the hybrid person will then have the opportunity to step into Ted's shoes.

It's a novel solution.

It also poses a couple of problems. Well, rather a lot of them, really. Ted will be working set days a week*, and one of the things we need is someone to cover the days he's not here. The PA side of the role isn't that structured, though, and on the days when there are planning retreats, team leader meetings, workshops to organise or attend there's a good chance we'll just have no-one. Granted, having no-one is generally an improvement on having Ted, but it's not really sustainable on a long-term basis if the rest of us are actually expected to be able to go about our work or take leave.

I'm also fairly confident no thought's been given as to what happens if the hybrid decides they don't want to continue in Ted's footsteps. I know, I know: that's just crazy talk. After all, unless they've come from a particularly hellish, dead-end team, who wouldn't choose to return to their original team after six months being tugged between two quite different roles, extensively mistrained by Ted, and corrected by everyone else?

But this is all still theoretical, anyway. Nothing's been put in motion yet, so when Ted's part-time status kicks in next week there won't be anyone to cover those extra days. In a best-case scenario, filling the role by advertising internally is going take a minimum of four weeks assuming we accept whoever we get^; more likely we're looking at 6-8 weeks.

But wait! There's more!

A similar logic is at work in another team we work closely with, and where we pay the Pet Tech's salary so they can provide support for a number of things we need done. When Pet Tech v1 took up a more senior position in the same team, he was replaced with someone who didn't have the required skill-set, so Pet Tech v1 had to keep supporting his old role on top of his new duties.

This was not a resounding success.

Now Pet Tech v1 has left for another job entirely, most of the work he used to do is no longer covered at all. Not to worry, though, because management have come up with yet another plan that bypasses the need to advertise externally for qualified staff with the right skills. The Redneck Tech has been acting the acting team leader for the last few months, and was due to return to his normal role very soon.  Instead, he's being offered the senior tech role recently held by Pet Tech v1 ... except Redneck Tech doesn't have a programming background, either.

The solution?  My team will pay for training for both tech positions to develop the skills they should already have had when they were appointed to their roles.

Don't get me wrong. I like both Pet Tech v2 and Redneck Tech, and appreciate the quality of their work. Redneck Tech has been a good, responsive acting team leader, and Pet Tech v2 has, in many ways, been far better than his predecessor at getting the non-programming work done quickly and without fuss (and, more importantly, without descending into talk of shifting paradigms and the latest white paper draft).

This place has a strange and frustrating aversion to actually filling roles properly. There's a strange belief that it's somehow cheaper or more efficient to throw existing staff into new roles and hope the gaps in their skills can be covered before things fall apart. It's the same rationale behind The Invertebrate's appointment as team leader: give the job to someone missing most of the critical skills, belatedly realise something important is missing, and then appoint a second person to cover that gap.

---

* In a purely technical sense only. What he'll actually be doing is turning up to warm a chair between roaming the building to tell people how his semi-retirement's going. When he's not burning up his sick leave balance, that is.

^ Whoever, or whatever. Privately I expect the semi-human denizens of Accounts will use the opportunity to offload one of their under-performing minions on us. Again, though, this may still be a step up from Ted given how low the bar has been set.

No longer in Kansas, either figuratively or literally

Ted's on the phone to a client, having somehow blundered into a conversation where he's been asked for advice on how to install software. It happened when he tried pretending to know more than he actually does, and did such a convincing job that his attempts to brush the client off with repeated cries of "But I'm not technically minded!" just didn't work. Now he's trying a new strategy.

"There'll be a wizard. The wizard will know what to do. The wizard will tell you what steps to take!"

Welcome to Oz. That's the bastard child of the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion in the corner over there. He'll be with you shortly.

Words, words, words...

No, look. I'm sorry, Stress Fiend, but it's not actually enough for you to just use English words when you talk to me. You have to string them together into something approximating a sentence and, please, give them some context. Otherwise what you're doing is no more a form of communication than Tourette's syndrome.

Just another day...

The Stress Fiend is demonstrating yet again that she's constitutionally incapable of taking only one day off at a time. I'm fairly confident she'll be back tomorrow, though, because otherwise she needs to produce a medical certificate. On the other hand, The Invertebrate would need to insist on seeing it.

In the meantime, Ted E. is ... trying to create a graph in Excel? Dear god, why?

Actually, it's not hard to guess why. He wants to try to make a point about how much work he does - or how much work he believes someone else isn't doing - and has once again confused graphical reporting with magic. He'd have made such a happy caveman in some prehistoric, shamanic culture.

In the modern world, though, it's rather like watching a real-life pig attempting to build its house of bricks, where the pig keeps rolling in the cement to cool off, and then wonders why it's suddenly getting harder to move.

"Yes, we can; and no, we won't."

"This supplier we've been dealing with for ten years and have scores of emails from in our shared Inbox ... can you tell me their email address?"

It's a small question, but one of such awesomely staggering laziness and unadulterated time-wasting (he could have looked up the answer several times over in the time it took to walk across the room, deliver a pointless preamble  and then finally ask the question) that I'm still trying to decide if I should go for a walk or just beat the hell out of him on the spot.