Reaching for the sky

No Ted today, which is always a good thing. I don't even care especially whether he'd legitimately sick or simply malingering because he's being worn out by having to work three or four hours a day.

Then The Invertebrate arrived this morning and checked his voicemail when he noticed Ted was missing. Wearing a look of surprised disbelief (otherwise known as the "wtf?" expression),  he repeats Ted's message:

"I woke up this morning with sore eyes, so I won't be coming in today. If you don't mind."

I'm not sure if dissolving into laughter was the correct response, but it seemed the only suitable one.

Own worst enemies

Looking at some of the operational documents the Stress Fiend has been creating ... she doesn't so much  make a rod to beat herself with, as express courier a personal invitation and baseball bat to every sadist within a hundred mile radius.

Glimmerings of sentience?

Ted's asked me to read an email he sent to a client yesterday to see if I'm happy with it. Understandably this set alarm bells ringing, not least because he's never given a damn about my opinion on anything before now.

It actually manages to be worse than I suspected.

It's a mixture of a hand-washing confession of ignorance and simultaneous attempt to provide answers based on a loose keyword search in Google (have I mentioned before that he doesn't know how to actually use Google or, indeed, any kind of search tool?), culminating in a half-hearted plea for more information.

Each part by itself isn't that bad.  It's not great, either, and is written in Ted's unique brand of Pidgin English, the very existence of which is an achievement in itself as English is nominally his first - and only - language. But I certainly don't have a problem with telling clients we don't know the answer and need some more information from them before we can proceed. I wish he'd do it more often instead of making stuff up and then leaving it to someone else to clean up the mess.

Okay, perhaps I was being overly charitable: the middle part, the random web search for things he thinks might be useful to the client?

It's heroically bad. It's on par with the algorithm Amazon use for their recommendations ("We see you bought a copy of the graphic novel From Hell. Would you like a pair of Wolverine underpants to go with that?"), but even that doesn't convey the scale of how truly bad it is.

Which is: it's so bad that even Ted suspects he's not making any sense.

"I like to watch..."

Ted E.'s on an energy-efficiency kick, courtesy of a council brochure dropped into his letterbox offering to do an energy-efficiency check of his house.

"My neighbours are so wasteful with their lights. Every time I look into their place at night they've got all the lights on, in all the rooms. Front rooms, back rooms, everywhere."

I'll just leave you to think about that statement for a moment.  It doesn't get any less creepy.

Sometimes this place makes me laugh

Redneck Tech: "I'm getting a dog. A rottweiler."

Invertebrate: "You're nuts."

"Why?"

"Because you've got small kids, and Rottweilers like eating people."

"Any animal can be a danger to small kids. You just have to train them properly."

"They eat adults, too."

"I know! Isn't that cool?"

"What are you going to do if it turns on you or the kids?"

"I've got plenty of guns. It won't be a problem."  Pause.  "And it's not like it would be the first time, anyway."

I weep, for the day is still young

Oh, for...  Everything below happened within the first 45 minutes of me arriving at the office.

*****

Ted's just discovered something that's been a basic part of one our primary systems for the last two and a half years. So it's a long way from being a new or even recent feature, and it's been a prominent part of our client-side website since the outset ... yet somehow he's managed to never see it before. He's now warbling on about how nice it looks, and how wonderful it is we're able to do such great things.

"Great things" in this case simply being the provision and correct formatting of information on our website. What he only dimly grasps is that this only happens when I become aware that someone's posted semi-unintelligble rubbish on our site and go in to clean it up. I suppose I should be pleased at the unintended compliment, but I'd rather he and the Stress Fiend just did it properly in the first place.

*****

Only minutes after that, he announces he's decided unilaterally to give out client details to people too cheap to actually pay for their own stuff. That way the tightwads can ring our clients directly and try to harass them into giving up their software. This fits comfortably within his definition of excellent client service, and saving the organisation money.

Oh, god. The Invertebrate thinks that letting random people harass our clients rather than manageing the task ourselves (which, you know, is part of what we're supposed to be doing here) is a good idea.

*****

"Did you book me in for a training course?"

It turns out that he's just received a request for feedback for a training course he was apparently supposed to attend last week.  Investigation turns out that Ted had, in fact, registered himself for it.

"But how was I supposed to know when it was on?"

More investigation reveals that the course is recorded in his calendar. Where he entered it. After receiving the invitation from the people running the half-day course.

"Oh, I never look at my calendar. They should have reminded me."

Presumably because he hasn't actually worked out how to set a reminder in the calendar he doesn't use.

The Invertebrate tells him to register for the next course.

"But I don't really want to do it."

"But I want you to do it."  (This is close as The Invertebrate gets to ever reminding Ted who's actually - nominally - in charge here.)

The course? Customer Service Skills.

Who edits the editor?

Damn The Invertebrate for telling Ted E. it was possible to edit html files in Word.

I know he only did it to stop Ted hyper-ventilating the first time he opened an html editor, but going in afterward to clean up the resulting mess is time-consuming and tiresome given that Ted's editorial skills are at a level where if there was a way for him to glue coloured string and macaroni to an electronic document, he'd be doing it.

Hysterical Revisionism

No, you idiot. When I tell you that someone didn't speak to me about something, that means they didn't speak to me about something. Just because you saw me talking to them three days ago doesn't mean I was talking to them about the one thing that's rattling around in your empty skull at the moment.

Printing off a piece of paper about the thing you think I must have been talking out and waving it at me as documentary evidence will not magically rewrite the past and cause me to suddenly admit that yes, that's exactly what happened and I've just been lying about it all along.

Etiquette

The Pet Tech is congratulating himself and his team on having successfully resolved something that's been a bugbear for nearly a year now, loudly expressing his amazement at the organisation's lack of communication skills and impressing upon everyone that if his team had known about this problem from the start much unnecessary work could have been avoided.

He's not being particularly obnoxious about it (yet), but this does raise an interesting point of etiquette. Is it considered more polite to:

• appear needlessly quarrelsome now by reminding him that that he and his team were aware of the problem, involved in meetings to deal with it, and advised of the workaround that's been in place for a year; or,
• let him keep going until he does get obnoxious about it, and then forward him the email chain showing he'd been told about it ages ago, particpated in meetings in how best to work around the problem, and then did nothing?

It's like blood sports in a cubicle

Round One

"I still need an answer to those two questions I asked."

"Which questions were those?"

"The ones about the statuses?"

"What statuses? I've been away for a couple of days, remem -"

"Because I really want to know the answers, because I don't know what the answer is."

"Okay, but you'll need to let me know what the ques -"

"And I really want to know. Because I don't know what to tell people and I want to tell them exactly what the statuses are."

Eventually The Invertebrate manages to get Ted to tell him what questions he meant.

Round Two

"You'd probably have to talk to HR to get them to - "

"Because I don't know."

"To HR. They'll be - "

"I keep getting phone calls about this* and I don't know what to tell people."^

"..."

"What? HR? I don't know who to talk to there. Can't you tell me the answer? Because I need to know exactly what to tell people."

"Well I don't actually know because we don't look - "

"Because I don't know. And I really need to know, and no-one's ever been able to tell me. I need a list."

"You just call the general number and - "

"Someone should write a list. I need a list. Because I don't know the answer and I keep getting asked**. Why can't someone in our division tell me?"

"We're not HR. You might be able to - "

"Why doesn't our help desk have a list of what these statuses are?"

"Because it's a helpdesk tool, not the HR system."

"But it has statuses."

"But it's not the same system."

"It has to be - some of the statuses have the same name. And users are recorded in both systems. I'll just talk to the guys who look after the helpdesk."

"They're different systems. That's why HR - "

"I'll talk to the helpdesk. I want to know exactly what the statuses are and what they mean."

"They won't - "

"Because I need to know, you know."

Another confused and ear-bleedingly painful conversation takes place as the Invertebrate engages in another skirmish in the long, drawn-out war to convince Ted E. that the dodgy, error-ridden helpdesk software used by a couple of hundred IT staff isn't the same as the dodgy, error-ridden HR systems managing a few thousand employees and twenty-odd thousand clients^^.

Round Three

"Right... so these statuses are set in the HR system?"

"Yes."

"And that's not the same as the heldesk system?"

"Yes!"

There's  a pause. Ted E. very clearly doesn't believe The Invertebrate is telling the truth about this, but The Invertebrate is looking a bit wild-eyed by this point and Ted decides it's safer to humour him.

"So is there someone in our division I can talk to who can give me a list of the HR statuses I need to know about?"

"HR have a general - "

"I want to know. I need to know exactly what's on the list. What team looks after this?"

(No, I don't know why he's so averse to just calling HR directly. I figure it's either that he doesn't believe they actually exist - and there's certainly empirical evidence to suggest that - or, more likely, he's afraid they might ask who he is and why are we still paying you, anyway?)

The Invertebrate capitulates and tells Ted which team may be able to give him the list, presumably to forestall Ted asking him to do it for him.

Endgame

Ted E. then doesn't call the other team; instead he emails the client back to tell them everything he'd just been told wasn't the case, and leaves them just as helpless and infinitely more confused than they were before he started "helping" them.

---

* Lies!

^ Damned lies!

** Any more damned lies and they'd be morphing into statistics.

^^ The HR systems are even more dodgy and error-ridden than the helpdesk software, but it hurts more when it fails so more effort is made to keep it's life support functioning.

Low entry standards

Well of course if you give us incorrect information and ask the techs to install something on the wrong computer it won't be on the computer you really wanted it on. 

Why are you surprised?

This is why we have "Technology" in our division name, not "Magic and Applied Mind-Reading".

What's in a name?

One of the other teams we work closely with has their own Ted, in more ways than one. They share the same real name, and similar work practices (i.e. pass it on to someone else as fast as humanly possible).

The other Ted has this habit he can't seem to shake, where he'll stick his head over the partition wall to ask the real Ted a question. The real Ted then denies any knowledge of the answer, washes his hands of any involvement in the matter, and then passes Pretend Ted on to someone else. It usually falls to me (not, surprisingly, because Ted E. passes me the buck - he doesn't actually tell Pretend Ted who he should talk to for an answer, just "not me") because I seem to be the only person actually present the majority of the time.

We've gone through this several times already this week, and now we've just gone through it yet again. Pretend Ted continues to seek advice from Original Ted, despite every single experience telling him that OT won't actually possess an answer, and continues to ignore me despite the fact I've given him every single answer he's come looking for.

There must just be something about their name.

Not technically-minded

Fortunately I have a roadtrip on Friday, because Ted E. is gearing up to make this week a long one. Not only is he treating the Stress Fiend's continued absence as a calculated affront, but he's struggling once more with the concept that while he chooses to start at 8am while The Invertebrate and I start at 9, this doesn't actually mean he works more hours in a day than we do or that everything else grinds to a halt in his absence and we just put our feet up once he leaves.

It's an arrangement that's entirely his choice, but the amount of badly-concealed resentment he harbours about occasionally being the only person here for that first hour of the day is bewildering. Or would be, in a normal person. In Ted it's just another one of those things.

One of those oh-so-many things...

On the other hand, at least he's still capable of providing some entertainment at his own expense, as he desmonstrated in his latest exchange with a client. Bear in mind the following as you read this:

1. we work in an IT environment. Theoretically, even the administrative staff should have at least some knowledge of computers and technology beyond what a half-smart parrot can pick up from rote learning;
2. a large part of our job is software procurement (or, as Ted insists on calling it, "procruement") so there's also some assumption that we know just a little bit about software;
   
3. he's been in this unit for several years now. Again, theoretically, this would give a normal person ample time to acquire some rudimentary knowledge about software and IT concepts;
4. clients place the majority of their orders through a web-based interface, generating the small amount of legitimate work that Ted E. actually does. In other words, you wouldn't call it's significance to his job minor.
   

"Oh, I don't really know about anything technical ... You're using IE8? I don't know that one - what browser and version is it? Does it run under Windows? ... What browswer am I using? Oh, I don't know. I just click on the button and it starts my Internet Explorer. I don't know what kind it is. I only use what they give me."

I dearly want to see how his job was originally advertised - or what it was even supposed to be - and what the selection criteria were.

Still not dead.

There's been a particular task - and I'm sure I've mentioned this previously - that my "team"* has been doing for Gollum and his predecessors for the last couple of years, and which I've been trying to offload from us because it's not our role, we're the worst-positioned team to be trying to look after this stuff, and Ted E. has been using it for a long time to mask how little he actually does, stretching a 60-minute, once-a-week task into something that consumes all his attention for two to three days at a time...

... although, now I come to think of it, maybe it quite legitimately takes him that long to do something a normal person can do in under an hour...

Anyway.

Needless to say, Ted E. has fought tooth and nail to prevent having this task taken from him. Earlier this year he tried to demonstrate to The Invertebrate how challenging the work was, and why it took him so long to do it. The Invertebrate looked at it carefully, then looked at what we're actually supposed to be doing, and announced "This is crap! Why are we doing this when Gollum's team are supposed to be looking after this stuff?" At which point Ted E. beat a hasty retreat behind a smokescreen of assurances that it was all quite easy to do, really, and not at all time-consuming and that he was really very happy to keep on with it and please don't take my easy work away from me and make me do real stuff like everyone else has to.

Now, though, Ted has become bored with it (maybe because it's now coming through as a regular weekly occurrence rather than something intermittent, and people have started to call him on his bluff that he does it punctually every week - it stops being a fun way of killing time once peple start expecting you to follow up on your claims) and is starting to whinge about having to do it.

The Invertebrate, who I suspect suffers mild ADD because he seems oblivious to the previous conversations about this, is once again fired-up to push the work back onto Gollum and Co. and has tabled it for discussion at our next team meeting. Given that Ted E. is the only one who's ever wanted to retain this task, the outcome would seem like a bit of a no-brainer ... except sooner or later Ted's going to realise that if he suddenly clears up two days in his schedule he's going to be expected to fill it with something at least tenuously work-related.

The upcoming backflips are sure to be entertaining.

---

* Anytime I talk about us as a team I can practically hear the quotation marks slipping into place on either side of the word, so I may as well set them down in black and white.

The *other* kind of proactive.

Before going away for a couple of days the Stress Fiend warned me about an order that was going to cross Ted E.'s desk: "Watch out for it, because this isn't the same as the stuff we've already ordered for someone else, he'll think it is, and then try to either give away the other client's stuff or haggle with them to give away their gear instead of just buying what the new client actually needs."

Sure enough, the order hits Ted E.'s desk, he places it with the supplier and then rings the existing client to tell them he's received a request for some more of the stuff they already have.  The client is understandably confused. Does Ted want him to share some of his inventory if he has a surplus?

"Oh no. I've already placed the order for the new stuff. I just wanted to tell someone."

The Invertebrate half-collapses with laughter and, when Ted gets off the phone, asks him what was the point of "just wanting to tell someone".

"I just get inquisitive," Ted claims.

(Inquisitiveness and curiosity are his perennial justifications for assuming he's the only one who understands what's going on and is therefore entitled to interfere in everyone else's job. He thinks it sounds better than "meddlesome and have too much free time" and that we're all fooled.)

I explain that the Stress Fiend had already looked into everything Ted E. was trying to meddle with (tactfully refraining from saying this was because she knew he'd do exactly what he was doing). The Invertebrate explains that sometimes just because two things look the same and one person has plenty of it, doesn't mean you can "borrow" from them and give it to someone else.

Ted sulks: "Well I'm sorry for trying to be pro-active, then!"

Because in the Ted E.-verse proactivity is all about doing something for one client that you don't understand but nevertheless disagree strenuously with, and then running off to a second client to tell them you were just forced at gunpoint to do the wrong thing.

Magic reporting.

Invertebrate: "Ted? That reconciliation spreadsheet you do - is that based on some kind of mathematical - "

Ted E. (genuinely surprised): "No!"

Me: [coughing fit]

Invertebrate: "So where does it come from?"

Ted E. [blank]: "I run the report."

It's always "the report", no matter what's being discussed. This is just one of the many challenges involved in trying to make sense of anything Ted says, because it's almost invariably devoid of context. That quote by Clarke about any suffiiciently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic? Now you know the kind of person he had in mind when he wrote that.

Nobody knows the problems he's seen. Really. Not even him.

"No-one replied to this email I sent weeks ago pointing out problems."

"We fixed them."

"But if you look at these reports I printed out from our database, you can see that there's lots of similar problems still there." *

"I'm looking at the reports but I can't see where they're saying there's a problem, or what the problem is. They're just numbers without any kind of analysis."

"Weeelll ... you have to know how to read them the right way. Then you can see where the problems are."

"Okay, can you show me a couple of examples, then?"

"What?"

"Show me a couple of the problems these reports are showing, and then I'll work through the rest and see if I can identify the rest of the problems."

"Oh. Oh, these reports. Oh. Well. Um, no. The reports don't actually show the problems. To see the things I think are problems, you have to have too much free time, not enough interest in doing your own job, and a burning desire to find fault in the work of others even though you refuse to understand what it is they're doing or why."

Paraphrasing, of course.

---

* Ted's a big believer in pre-written reports that he can run with the press of a button. Of course he doesn't actually understand the contents of the reports, but he's a firm believer in the power of the printed summary even where the underlying data is known to be incomplete or unreliable. He has an evangelical faith that anything generated from a system as part of an automated process must be free of the human errors - for the sake of argument we'll count Ted as human in this case - that corrupted the data in the first place.

And I thought *I* wasn't a team player...

What a surprise. Ted E. has just taken it upon himself to do exactly the thing we discussed as a team the other week and said we weren't going to do because of technical issues. But sticking with the team decision meant he was actually going to have to not just do something, but actually look at what he was doing, so compared to that trauma you can see why he felt making yet another unplanned and unannounced change to our primary database was the better way to go.

Now he's complaining that the system is throwing up error messages.

Desperate for attention

After a quick rummage through the files, Ted E. loudly exclaims "Oh, look at that!"

No-one bites. We all have real jobs. Technically even me, even if no-one's quite sure what it is, and I'm actually wrestling with a stupidly formatted and security-locked "correct-these-details-and-return" form from one of our myriad idiot suppliers*.

Ted senses the ambivalence and wanders over to the Stress Fiend's desk. "Well, look at this!" he says more loudly, just to make sure he gets someone's attention. "This slipped past me!" 

(All of this can only mean he's found something he's afraid of getting in trouble for and doesn't think he can cover up, so he's trying to show how careful he is by double-checking his own work. Which probably means that it's something irrelevant, because if it was actually important either the Stress Fiend or I would have seen some trace of it by now.)

The only thing less surprising than this is the complete lack of surprise from everyone else in the office. Appearing slightly offended at the lack of reaction, or perhaps simply worried that he's losing his audience, Ted E. produces a piece of paper with flourish.

"Look," he urges the Stress Fiend. "I missed this, somehow."

The Stress Fiend glances at the paper, grunts dismissively and goes on with her work.

Ted returns to his desk and begins sulking. It's a Friday, so this means he'll either leave extra early today, or stay extra late (maybe even until 3.30!) to demonstrate what a martyr he is.

---

* That is, suppliers who are idiots, rather than suppliers of idiots. We're entirely self-sufficient in that respect.

Incompatible minds

We've already been asked to pre-order calendars and diaries for next year, and The Invertebrate reminded us that we'll also need a wall-planner just to mark in leave dates. This caused the Stress Fiend to mention Ted E. losing his temper at her at the start of this year when she threw out last year's planner back in January, and he felt it should be preserved because it was a record of people's planned absences in 2009.

The Invertebrate makes the mistake of trying to understand Ted's point.

"What? He - what? What? But that's just - what??? Sorry. Sorry."

- pause - 

"He WHAT???"