"Work cheaper, not smarter."

Times are tough, and senior management responded in the time-honoured tradition by calling a two-day workshop for all senior management and team leaders in my division, so they could discuss yet again how to wring blood from a stone. All well and good, and nothing out of the ordinary ... until they also declared that everyone at my level also had to attend, and offer up a PowerPoint presentation on things we could do to make things better.

I stopped laughing at this point but, in the end, the whole thing didn't turn out too badly.

Firstly there was the amusement factor involved in holding a workshop about productivity and seeking to do more with less at a golf resort 50 miles away from where most of the attendees live and work, forcing the majority to spend an extra hour traveling each way just to get there. On top of that, no-one was really that keen to use their own cars, so everyone booked out work vehicles for the entire day and ran up extra fuel costs across our division.

My inner cynic was already feeling revitalised.

Then someone else "borrowed" the car I was supposed to travel down in, forcing a hasty scramble for alternative transport and ensuring we arrived fashionably late. The individual who'd stolen the car was already there, so when the facilitator decreed we should introduce ourselves with name, team, and an interesting fact about ourselves, one of my colleagues decided his interesting fact would be "and I'm late because some bastard took the car I'd already booked." But he's almost due for long-service leave, and doesn't care who he offends anymore.

Two presentations later and we were already behind schedule because senior management keep forgetting that (generally speaking) your average support tech doesn't know how to write or pace presentations, and will prepare lots of content and then simply read it out. Suddenly everyone's presentation timeslots were slashed to get things back on schedule.

Gimli and Marvin (his counterpart, responsible for managing a team that does similar things to Gimli's) used their joint presentation to engage in a territorial dispute disguised as a discussion on the importance of communication and cooperation, presumably under the orders of their manager in an attempt to make them play nicely with each other. Marvin opened with a recitation of the many ways in which Gimli's teams failed at communicating anything. Gimli countered by relentlessly quoting from past policy statements to show that the fault really lay with Marvin's teams' - and therefore Marvin himself. Then we were all told it's now a hanging offense to travel to any of our sites without informing the team leader at that location, presumably so he can follow the interloper around and freshly mark his territory all over again.

Sometimes it's more obvious than others that IT remains a male-dominated industry.

At the end of the day, our Director arrived to give a presentation on the opportunities for productivity awaiting us all. He opened with several slides of statistics explaining that our organisation is, essentially, doomed. The high Australian dollar means revenue is dropping because we can't compete with the international market. But that's okay, because we're charging the remaining ones more to compensate - how can we go wrong with that? Our domestic clients are leaving us for our local competitors, so we're not retaining any of the local market, either. A visible cloud of impending doom descended over the room.

Then Gimli asked the Director where he saw us being in five years' time. "This is a visionary question," he declared.

"It's funny you should ask that, because I was going to address that in my presentation tomorrow."

He was genuinely surprised when he was told two-thirds of his audience wouldn't be there in the morning and he'd only be talking to team leaders and management, so clearly that communication thing is working well for us.

"Ah, okay. Well, I have a slide showing the range of services we support now, and I have one showing what we'll be supporting in 2025. And there's a big red 'X' through everything you guys do."

Silence. Deathly silence. At-least-he-went-out-with-a-bang-Mrs-Cobain silence.

A team leader pipes up, trying to dispel some of the Mordor-like cloud of despair enveloping the room: "Would that be a good 'big red X' or a bad 'big red X'?"

The Director seems to realise that, just maybe, he could have phrased things better* and tries to salvage the situation.

"Now I'm not saying you won't still have jobs," he begins ... and while I can't remember what his exact words were, it translated as something like "but we don't know what they're going to be, and we're pretty sure they won't be here."

Surprisingly this neither lifts the mood nor reinvigorates discussion of the many "opportunities" awaiting us. But that doesn't really matter, because the driver of my car has had enough and wants to leave now (see previous about long-service leave and not giving a damn) and I get to escape before sitting through any more presentations. It means I miss seeing how The Invertebrate goes with his, but it also means I avoid having my cynicism buffers overloaded by another manager's spiel on his virtualisation project, which I suspect will boil down to something like this:

Step 1: Virtualise!
Step 3: Rainbows & unicorns for everybody!

which is what every presentation I've seen about virtual desktops in my sector comes down to in the end.

So as far as productivity goes, it was every bit the tragic and inevitable waste I expected, but it wasn't without its unintended highlights.

And there was hazelnut gelatto at lunch. I'll put up with a lot for that.

---

*Although he still has a long way to go before he reaches the standard set by his predecessor, who famously described us all as "bottom-feeders" at the annual staff recognition and rewards ceremony and then wondered why people took offense.

Recursion: it's like Inception, but stupid.

La Mondaine is slowly - very slowly - cataloguing our far-too-large software collection. It's only taken a year to reach this point, during which she's worked hard to find other things she'd rather be doing (and it's only been five years since I first said this really needed to be done so we knew what we actually had).

Unfortunately, instead of simply weeding out the duplicates*, she's also decided that for "old" software (and her definition of "old" is highly variable, completely subjective, and based almost exclusively on what she sees as her extensive and detailed knowledge of software) she "needs" to ring the original client to see if they still want it ... kind of overlooking the fact that even if they still work here, the odds are good they're no longer the person using it and probably can't say whether or not it's still in use.

(Yes, we have tried telling her not to do this and that it's unnecessary for what we actually want. Even direct instructions don't work - they just impact on the swampy surface of her brain, and are quickly sucked beneath the mire.)

She's using our puchasing database to discover the original user, and is assuming that where she can't get hold of them, the admin staff who placed the request or the manager who approved the expense are the obvious fallback positions. This led to her finding some requests created by our much-missed (by me, at least) hyper-efficient team-member of a couple of years ago when she was cleaning up a lot of the errors in our systems. La Mondaine knows about this staff member but failed to either recognise her name (halfway understandable) or notice that The Invertebrate was recorded as the approver (*not* understandable. In fact it's borderline retarded).

She found the former team-mate's extension number and began trying to call her. La Mondaine was convinced she was still working here somewhere, because every time she tried to call, the line was engaged. After this happened a few times, she concluded there must be something wrong with their phone and wandered around to the telecomms team to report the fault with the number. They checked the extension in their system ... and inform La Mondaine that it was her phone number.

Yes, that's right. All this time, La Mondaine has been sitting at our former team-mate's old desk, dialing her own phone number repeatedly, and wondering how someone could possibly be busy on the phone every time she called.

(Presumably because anyone with any common sense normally pretends they're simply not there at all.)

---

* We have many, many needless duplicates of so many things. Not only does the team have a long and deeply-entrenched culture of never throwing anything out, it also used to run on the theory that you can never have too many duplicates of something. I tried several times to call them on it, pointing out we had multiple physical copies of the same minor piece of software and producing said copies to illustrate my point.

"No, you're wrong," Ted E. intoned smugly, "It's different software. You can tell, because the label is different. See?" And he pointed to the Purchase Order number printed on the label.

"We put that on the label. It doesn't come from the vendor like that. The actual software - and I've checked the disc contents, and what we actually ordered - the actual software is identical across all of these."

Ted shook his head condescendingly. "You're not used to how we do things here, so you wouldn't understand. You see, the number is different."

They're not getting any smarter

3.29pm: the client submits a request to have a new computer set up.

3.33pm: the client remembers they've nominated themselves as the financial approver for their request, and self-approves.

3.38pm: the client calls me to ask how their new computer is going, and whether it's nearly ready.

Ignorance and construction.

We've had some fairly extensive renovations and partial refurbishments going on throughout our building for, oh, forever it seems like, but in reality it's only been the better part of two years.

(The money, naturally, has run out before the threadbare, water-stained carpets and nicotine-coloured lighting in my workspace could be replaced. But as a consolation prize, senior management have arranged for the steam-cleaning of said threadbare carpets, presumably to coincide with the silver jubilee celebrations since they were last cleaned.)

As part of this ongoing punishment of everyone working here, we've also been receiving a steady stream of well-meaning but only semi-coherent emails telling us to beware of, for example, Stairwell #3 at some random compass-point end of the building that gives no point of reference at all to people trapped in a maze of corridors and cubes with no view of the world outside. A simple floorplan diagram showing the afflicted areas would be enough but seems to be asking too much. The Stress Fiend now greets each new update with a cry of "Pictures! Goddamn pictures, people!")

Anyway. Stream of emails.

Because La Mondaine only attends a couple of days a week, she often has a backlog of email to catch up on. Typically this is the first thing she does after her morning gossip, comparison of bowel experiences, and surreptitious prowl through our database to break things. She then somehow manages to forget that some of the emails are nearly a week old, and begins to read various announcements to the rest of us, or ask what she needs to do to prepare for something that's been and gone.

Of course we've already established she has no sense of the passage of time. If the fact she struggles to comprehend we're not still working in the early 1990s isn't evidence in itself, she also didn't believe she'd been back here for a year already (and oh! does it seem so much longer!).

Very recently, though, one of the project managers for the renovations/refurbishment/consolation prize carpet-cleaning relocated to an office near us, and when La Mondaine found the latest round of email updates she headed straight to the office to quiz the project officer about their meaning, even though everything they mentioned was already long past.

Today yet another email has gone out to all staff announcing another round of drilling and construction noise ... but this time the subject header includes "La Mondaine, you may ignore this..."

Let's see if it works.

Filing by attrition.

The filing, then ... The running battle to convince La Mondaine that filing was her assigned task may have been won, but the war continues.

First there was the terrible problem that La Mondaine wasn't simply able to take the suspension files out of the filing cabinet and stick them straight into the archive boxes...

Well, technically she could but then wasn't able to close the lid afterwards.

Okay, well, technically she could close the lid, but only by half-destroying it and bending the metal strips on the files in the process. Yes, that's correct. Being unable to close the lid in the first place wasn't a big enough hint that it wouldn't work - she had to push things to a literal breaking point.

After a half-hour panic attack, she called Archives for advice, and was swiftly told that no, she couldn't just leave the lids sitting loosely on top of the boxes. No, there weren't special extra-large lids she could use and, no, they wouldn't consider ordering in extra-sized ones just for her.

After hyperventilating for a while, she removed some of the suspension files from the boxes and then placed them back inside, optimistically assuming that this would somehow cause the boxes and files to reconfigure themselves into more useful dimensions.

Weary sighs greeted their failure to spontaneously resize themselves.

Eventually The Invertebrate wandered past, La Mondaine poured out her troubles to him, and he made the mistake of suggesting the solution that had occurred to me back at the outset but which I'd refrained from mentioning because it was only going to lead to pain.

"How about you just take the paperwork out of the suspension files and put it in the boxes like that? It's all in manila folders, anyway, isn't it? Just archive it that way."

And that's a perfectly sensible suggestion. It's exactly what I'd have said, except previous experience with La Mondaine tells me exactly what's going to happen next.

"But then the files will all fall over! They won't be able to stand up without the hanging file!"

"Can't you just file them flat?"

"Noooo! Because then we can't sort through them!"

"But ... we're archiving these and sending them off-site because they're old. As long as we know what's in the box, we don't need to be able to rifle through them like files, surely?"

"The Stress Fiend will be angry if I file them flat! They have to stand up!"

(La Mondaine is frequently paralysed by fear of the Stress Fiend. So much so that it's becoming a problem.)

"Well, I don't know, just try to put enough in each box that they hold each other up."

"But they'll slip down. And then they'll be flat. And the Stress Fiend will be angry!"

She hyperventilates some more. The Invertebrate looks on helplessly. The filing reaches an impasse yet again.

To be continued...

Stubbornness vs Stupidity. Round One.

The Invertebrate says: "La Mondaine, I'd like you to leave the computer systems alone and just concentrate on sorting out the inventory and filing we brought you back here to help with in the first place."

La Mondaine hears: "Computer systems! Right! I'll get right on it!"

[There then follows several short and emphatic conversations between me, the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate during which it's made clear to him - again - that La Mondaine must not be allowed to touch any kind of digital record or worflow under any circumstances].

La Mondaine flounces in to work: "What would you like me to do today?"

The Invertebrate: "Concentrate on the filing. It's in a halfway state at the moment, and it's making it hard for the others to find stuff easily."

La Mondaine: "Right!"

[Five minutes later]

"What shall I do with the request from this client? I started trying to sort it out for them, and then it got really complicated..."

[The Stress Fiend goes on annual leave. The Invertebrate & I discuss how to keep everything running, seeing as senior management still won't allow us to replace Ted E. Personally I'm all in favour of just letting things collapse in a heap, because that seems to be the only thing that provokes management into actually acknowledging there's a problem. We agree - in the sense that I tell him this is how things must be - that La Mondaine will be pointed at the filing and banned from doing any work that involves a computer].

The Invertebrate is off-site for a management team bonding exercise. La Mondaine arrives to "work".

"What would you like me to do?"

"The filing."

"Not the service desk queue, or the email?"

"No, just the filing."

[A few minutes of silence].

"What do you think The Invertebrate would like me to do?"

"The filing."

"Are you sure? Maybe I should go on with something else just now, and we can ask him when he gets in."

"No, we spoke about this yesterday and agreed the filing is what you need to concentrate on."

"Oh..."

[Later.]

"This is driving me mad! When will The Invertebrate be in?"

"He's offsite all day. He won't be in."

"Oh. Was there anything else he wanted me to do today?"

"Filing."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely."

"Would you like me to - "

"No. Filing."

""How about I - "

"Filing."

"Oh..."

And so it comes about that the filing is finally - finally! - underway.

Gone, but *still* not forgotten. No matter how hard we try.

Oh, lord. I'm trying to unravel the mystery of Ted's efforts at stock control, and it's not so much a case of going down the rabbit hole, as it is tip-toeing along the edge of a black hole and trying not to fall in.

I've never seen straightforward incompetence elevated to the level of creative genius before.

The Rapture, continued

The saga of our own personal Rapture (otherwise known as the new service desk tool) continues.

The problem of everyone receiving email notifications for everything has been resolved. Not by the area managing the service desk software, however, but by users discovering the settings allowing them to specify what they'd like to be notified about and passing this along by word of mouth.

Naturally everyone did the obvious thing, and and now no-one is receiving any notifications at all.

And on a (possibly) unrelated note, Gollum (one of the chief suspects for requesting the mass auto-spamming of all staff) has disappeared on several weeks' leave. Presumably this had been planned for a while, but it wasn't actually revealed to anyone who needed to know - including, it appears, the team he manages.

The perils of being one's own authority

"Hi, I placed a request for some software two weeks ago, but my financial approver says they haven't seen it turn up in their queue to be authorised."

"Hmm, let me check that... Okay, that would be because you listed yourself as the financial approver, so any notifications will go straight to you, not them. I've fixed that up for you."

"Oh. Thanks."

The best part is she's received a reminder every day for the last fortnight informing her the request was waiting for *her* to authorise, and hasn't once questioned why she's been receiving the notifications ... presumably because she didn't read them and simply deleted them on sight.

It's not the end of the world.

We missed out on the Rapture, but we're now experiencing the next best thing: our new service desk tool went live today, and some of the decisions behind it have been ... inspired.

The standout decision, however, would have to be the one where it was decreed that everyone needed to receive an email notification each time a new request or incident was logged anywhere else across our division. We're not quite sure who to credit that one to. Rumour suggests either Gimli or Gollum, and while the latter seems the likeliest culprit, it also bears some of Gimli's hallmarks. In any case, we're anticipating a reversal of that decision in the very near future, but whether it comes before peoples' email quotas explode is debatable.

It's all very exciting, though.

(Oh, that's interesting - it turns out I'm receiving duplicates of some notifications because some fool has included me in the management structure.)

Snapshots

Between a slew of public holidays and simple workload, I've been a bit remiss in updates for the last few weeks. So here are some snapshots of recent events, culled and compiled from random howls of despair into the abyss that is Twitter:


Something In The Air

• On learning that a friend's career-pathing documentation is being recommended for use across similar organisations nationwide: "Does it include an option advising staff to just shoot themselves in the head if they work here? Also: congratulations. Plus, I appear to be having a morale problem today."
• My cynicism appears to be expanding to occupy the morale vacuum.
• Internal email: onoz! The evil smokerz have breached the organisation's security perimeter and, more importantly, organisational policy! (Possibly it's actually the smell of burning morale, in which case I'm probably to blame.)
• This bodes well: Lotus Notes couldn't even launch this morning without falling over and dying.
• Really, why am I providing tech support for home-use installations on peoples' personal PCs? It's an endemic problem amongst clients, desktop support, and my teammates: the organisation's official policy is "Home Use Is Good", but no-one actually wants to provide the resources to support it. It's all part of the warm, fuzzy aura of enabling staff development while allowing them to work unpaid using their own resources.
• Cynicism buffer has now melted.
• Lotus Notes fail! Haven't had one of those in, oooh, nearly 15 working hours... That must be some kind of record!
• "Mailfile has failed over" ... really, that's a phrase that should just never appear in any software interface for any reason.

Team Efforts

• Client: "It says I can use this software on my home computer, too, but I can't get it to run."
  La Mondaine: "Try installing the newer version on your work PC. That will help."
  Client: "WTF?"
• "LONG TIME NO HEAR!" the Stress Fiend bellows down the phone. Yes, I'm sure it will be...
• Stress Fiend says: "I'm going to lunch now."
  Stress Fiend means: "I'm going to dither for the next hour while you starve to death."
• Team planning day of doom awaits. Send rescue teams... Or airstrikes if rescue teams are unavailable.
• Feel slightly grubby at being the one who came up with the team's mission statement today.
• Experiencing the traditional start-of-week horror that I may end up on the same bus to work as La Mondaine.
• Oh, and it's just me covering all the operational stuff again today. Really, for all the opportunity I have to actually do my job they'd be better just scrapping my position and replacing me with one and a half grunts.
• You know, this whole "Let's not hire competent replacement staff" thing is really starting to wear a bit thin...
• As amusing as La Mondaine with no voice is in principle, it would still be nice to have someone else here to answer the phone.
• Thank you, subhuman teammates, for once more deciding that rather than choose the simple way, you'll try the complex, breakable way first.
• Has anyone else noticed how much despair sounds like bitterness?

Clients: A Superstitious And Cowardly Lot

• Dear client: how about instead of asking me what lies at the other end of that link on our website, you click it and find out. It's only a URL, after all, not a wormhole through space and time.
• Silly client. Of course if you give me the wrong email address you aren't going to get the stuff I send you...
• "No, sir, I'm afraid your version of MacOS has actually become more obsolete in the last year rather than less. Yes, I'm afraid it was very much on the cards that this was going to happen."
• No, you idiot client - just because you've added something to a shopping cart doesn't mean you've actually submitted an order.
• "The clients don't know which version of the software suits their computer at home." If they can't even use Google to check some basic information about their own property, why are we letting them log in to our systems?

Literal transcriptions

The Stress Fiend at work:

[indistinct mutter]
*snort*
*SNORT*
[indistinct mutter]
- cackle! - 
"That's what they get when ..."

Is it any wonder I often have absolutely no clear idea as to what she's doing?

Special Needs

"I can't find this information on our website, so how can we expect our clients to?"

I look at the web page La Mondaine is complaining about.

"The information's right there."

"But you know it's there! How was I supposed to find it? How are our clients?"

The page consists of three, one-sentence paragraphs.

"Wait, what was that first bit again?"

In a harm minimisation exercise, we're trying to keep La Mondaine away from anything remotely technical. Initially we were just trying to keep her away from anything involving computers, but after she broke two document shredders we've had to extend the boundaries somewhat. Needless to say, this doesn't leave a lot else for her to do here, particularly as she won't concentrate on the tasks she's been specifically asked to deal with.

Finally, in desperation, the Stress Fiend relinquished control of her much-loved stationery order. We don't order a lot of stationery, so her rationale was that if she told La Mondaine precisely what to order, there was little that could go wrong.

It was an interesting theory. Then ... I want to say "reality struck", but juxtaposing "reality" and "La Mondaine" like that is such a gross violation of the physical universe that I'd expect Stephen Hawking to turn up in a Dalek chair and exterminate me.

Anyway. La Mondaine cast her mind back to her original time here and remembered that reply-paid envelopes had once been used many years ago. Twenty minutes of "what if?" and "but don't you remember when?" later, the Stress Fiend finally snapped:

"No! For the umpteenth time - we do not need 'Reply Paid' envelopes!"

Two hundred dollars worth of reply-paid envelopes later...

Too lazy to lie.

We've just discovered the reason we haven't been able to trace a particular invoice in the financial systems is because Ted E. decided that rather than record the invoice number, he'd use a software serial number. And not even the software associated with that invoice, because that might offer a tentative clue enabling us to track the invoice down.

So he used the serial number of the previous version of the software instead.

It's hardly a revelation that Ted was a little arbitrary when it came to recording invoice details, and we already knew he made a lot of them up when he couldn't be bothered looking at the actual invoice. Back in the brief period when we had our fourth, super-efficient team member, that was one of the very first things she discovered.

No, what's surprising with today's discovery is that in his final year here he became too lazy to even make stuff up anymore, and just settled for copying random strings of characters from other sources. So who knows what other instances of delight and hilarity he laid in store for us before finally leaving?

(This all came to light because a client provided us with a quote they'd obtained, and wanted us to order it for them. We did - at a better price - passed the savings on to them, and somehow incurred the wrath of their auditors, who are now strenuously demanding a copy of all the paperwork to justify the lower cost. So no good deed goes unpunished.)

The enemy of my enemy

Well, in this case the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy, but that hasn't really kept the Stress Fiend and I from tag-trolling La Mondaine through most of the day so far. There's a wealth of guilty pleasure to be mined there, but I should probably stop taking the easy shots.

Maybe tomorrow...

Stress Fiend Lottery

Today we're playing Stress Fiend Lotto. She called in sick yesterday, hasn't turned up yet today, but hasn't been in touch to say whether she'll be in or not.

"Probably not" seems the likeliest answer but, as past experience shows, she likes to keep us in suspense. She also subscribes to the belief that as long as she calls in sick on the first day, we should assume "sick" until she eventually reappears. It's these little bits of quirky unpredictability, amongst other things, that make working with her such a delight.

Will she turn up?

Will she not turn up?

Will we see or hear from her at all this week?

Nobody knows...

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.

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* 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.