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.

A moment's silence. Perhaps a long overdue one, because I wasn't actually watching.

I finally noticed today that the old site, Enter The Cow-orker has disappeared offline. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later (my ex-wife kept the ISP account when we separated), but somehow managed to miss when it actually went.

I don't suppose anyone remembers the last time they saw it?

(And lest anyone's worried about it being irrevocably lost, I still have all the original Cow-orker files safely backed up. Perhaps one day they'll return.)

On a cheerier note, I see Blunt Trauma will soon be celebrating it's fifth birthday. Funny, though, that it's only five years: for some reason it's felt much longer.

A cyclical model of stupidity

It's not that I'm making up for being slack lately: Ted's just on a roll at the moment.

Awash in the afterglow of his Crystal Reports nostalgia, Ted's been running everyday, non-Crystal reports to try to recapture some of that glorious high. On the bright side, he hasn't lit a cigarette yet.

(And I'm sorry but, yes, I am trying to scar you with that image).

"I don't bother checking outstanding stuff that I might have to do something with. Only the stuff that affects other people. Here's a list of things I think you might want to look into because they're overdue."

He gives the Stress Fiend a report listing all the items he thinks need  to be followed up. Then he recites them to her as well, for good measure.

"Oh, and the figures I'm working from for that report are a month old, anyway, so they may not really be outstanding at all."

Places you don't want to go

I've mentioned before about Ted E.'s unshakeable faith in the power of system-generated reports.

What I didn't mention was that I'm convinced that at some point in his life he's had either a profound religious experience in the presence of Crystal Reports.

Or perhaps a sexual one.

Either way, he once saw someone in this team use it and has continued to rhapsodize over it ever since. No-one's used it in the four years I've been here, so it obviously belongs back in the Golden Age when everything worked perfectly, no-one asked him awkward questions like "why?" (or, more appropriately, "WTF???"), and the staffing levels were bloated enough to mask a treasure trove of inefficiencies and psychopathic behaviour.

Of course, this was also the same Golden Age where the primary database had no reporting capability at all, and without a separate programme to extract information it was impossible to retreive any of the corrupt and mismatched data stored within it, but we'll overlook that for the moment.

What brought this to mind was his conversation this morning with one of the techs, in which he once again evangelised on the magic of Crystal and bemoaned the fact we once had it, still have an old copy licensed to us, and yet no-one ever uses it anymore. Quite what's preventing him from using it isn't clear (okay, it is; but let's pretend otherwise for the moment), but underpinning the whole sermon is the same burning faith that Crystal will magically pull Truth and Order from the Chaos at the simple push of a button.

No need for any kind of user input  or designing of reports in the first place, of course. That kind of talk is heresy. It's already an article of faith that anything that comes out of a report is inherently True; if it comes out of Crystal Reports, then it's practically divine revelation.

Or the best sexual experience he's ever had.

I swear, I'm not making this up.

Nor am I even lightly embellishing it.

Ted E. just dragged a tech over to his desk to help him with a computer problem, and it culminated in the tech demonstrating the awesome power of CTRL+A. Ted's now agonising over the conceptual leaps involved in being able, with a single keyboard shortcut, to select everything at once.

He reached this dizzying state of revelation after repeated failed attempts to right-click on some files (one at a time, presumably) and copy them to another location. "Copy" wasn't coming up as an option, though, so clearly there was something terribly wrong with his computer.

In fact, as it turned out, it wasn't appearing as an option because he was only right-clicking on empty space near the file.

Ted's now grappling with the terrifying implications that by invoking CTRL+A, he now has the near-godlike power to inadvertently perform the mass deletion of files. He's already begun muttering about how it's useful to know, but he thinks he'll stick with selecting them individually from now on, thank you very much, because this is all too new.

Don't ask. Really. Just ... don't ask.

On a related note, he was also quietly scheming with another tech this morning to get some lessons in how to set up clients' computers. He's realised the techs get paid substantially more than he does and, when he moves interstate at the end of the year, has ambitions of talking his way into a better-paid, part-time job at a similar organisation on the basis of his mighty computing skills.