Santa Claus: not the only gentleman in red keeping lists

A couple of weeks ago I almost posted a mildly celebratory entry when it looked there was going to be no more La Mondaine for the the rest of the year and, possibly, at all. Luckily (remembering that there are many kinds of luck, and "good" is only one of them) I've worked here long enough to know better than to celebrate prematurely.

So when The Invertebrate asked last week (before going away for a month) whether we needed La Mondaine for anything before shutting down over Christmas, I wasn't completely surprised when the Stress Fiend claimed that yes, we did: there was stuff we absolutely had to have her back to do. For just one day. Apparently the Stress Fiend doesn't feel we're screwing up enough things by ourselves which, honestly, comes as a surprise to me given how many times in just the last week the Stress Fiend announced she'd fouled up the primary database by doing something inexplicable.

(I was less surprised that it was the same inexplicable thing every time. Rather than actually fix the mistake once she'd identified it, the Stress Fiend would exclaim loudly at the discovery, worry at it for a while until she accepted that it was, in fact, her fault ... and then forget about it until she'd try to run exactly the same process again a few hours later and encounter exactly the same problem.)


So, La Mondaine is back today. And, predictably, the Stress Fiend has called in sick, pleading a migraine. Probably because she spent the entire weekend working herself into one at the thought of having to deal with La Mondaine today.

This place really is a very special kind of Hell sometimes.

Freudian slips

It's telling that when the Stress Fiend begins working herself up to start a pointless fight about something, what she means to say is:

"I'm going to stir things up right now!"

But what actually comes out of her mouth is:

"I'm going to muddy the waters right now!"

Guess which one turns out to be the more reliable forecast?

Migration

The long, cruel and gibberingly-insane reign of Lotus Notes is finally drawing to a close here, and we're all slowly being migrated to the new Web Mail That Must Not Be Named. Or at least that's how I like to think of it: the decision was made several months ago, was one of the worst-kept secrets since I started working here, and yet no-one in middle management was allowed to actually speak the words aloud until the Grand Announcement ... which took a surprisingly long time to happen.

Anyway. No more Notes. Cause for rejoicing, you'd think, except for one thing: it's change.

Because we live an age of Staff Enablement (or, as it's colloquially known "Fix it yourself") parts of the actual migration between systems have been left to the end-users to do, following a series of slightly cryptic and mildly self-contradictory instructions emailed to those whose time has come. I'll admit I was a little bit cowboyish when my turn came, stopping just short of whooping triumphantly as I hit the 'Migrate Now' button, but the whole concept of a pre-migration checklist is based on the assumption you actually care whether the process succeeds and, well... *


Then it was the Stress Fiend's turn. I'd glanced at the instructions and decided I could happily ignore them. She scowled at them, but didn't actually attempt to digest what they said, and ranted at them instead. The results were predictable.

First she tried to log in before her migration was even being processed, and ranted angrily over her inability to log in. Clearly the whole system had failed, and was a monumental waste of resources. After several more attempts to log in before her new account even existed (including myriad combinations of usernames and passwords, rather than the one specific one she was told would work when the system was ready for her), she finally succeeded. But she's only just getting warmed up:

"I don't like this business about 'Stay signed in'."

"So don't stay signed in?"

"CHANGE! NEW THINGS! HATERAGEKILLARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!"

The initial ragefrenzy passes. She logs out, and then somehow is unable to log back in again.

I check the "What To Do If You Can't Sign In" email we were sent as an afterthought.

"Have you shut Firefox down and then started it again?"

"Yes! Of course I have. Heaps of time."

Then something seems to occur to her and she sounds almost like she's prepared to admit having made a mistake.

"Errr... so I have shut it down heaps of times but, ah, do you think it means just the window where I'm trying to log in, or all the other Firefox windows I've got open at the same time?"

"I think you'd want to shut all of them down."

"Oh..." The sound of several hasty mouse-clicks follows. "Well, it's a good thing I did that, too. Oh look! Suddenly it's decided to work! Typical. Now it's time for me to go home."

[pause]

"Arrrgghhh! How do you sign out of this stupid thing? Why did they have to pick such a useless, stupid, bloody wossname? What the hell were they ... oh. I click on where it says 'Sign Out'..."

---

* I've also been conscientious about managing important information correctly and not using my email as a document storage system, so there really isn't anything in there that's essential or irreplaceable. So, you know, I could legitimately not care if it didn't work.

An allegory in green

We recently changed from a supplier we'd been using for several years, which means someone else will be getting a million dollars or so over the duration of the next supply contract.

A week later, with Christmas starting to loom Putin-like over the horizon, suppliers are dredging through their databases, pulling out our contact details and sending us token gifts to remind us of their existence, and that we're still valued clients. In the past some of these gifts have included perishable items eight months past their use-by date and heavily-trodden boxes of chocolate, so it's not without a sense of amused cynicism that we look forward to this time of year.

A gift from our unsuccessful suppliers arrived: an extravagant serving of toffee-like confectionery wrapped in a range of seasonally-coloured foil. La Mondaine and The Invertebrate pounced on them immediately declared all of the colours except red to be inedible, and then proceeded to try to eat the rest anyway (declaring the green ones to be the worst).

Now ... what follows really tells you everything you need to know about my team-mates.

The Stress Fiend returned to work a day or so later and joined them, although in her typical spirit of contrariness she declared that The Invertebrate didn't know what he was talking about and the green ones were fine - as she then demonstrated by munching down as many of them as she could until reality struck and she realised that, in fact he was entirely correct. Which amused me, at least.

The Invertebrate then decided that the best way to deal with the green ones was to keep eating them and them alone until he became desensitised to them. This wasn't a great success, so he tried to eat a green one and another colour at the same time to see if he could cancel out the taste. Keep in mind that none of the flavours were actually pleasant to eat - the green ones were simply the worst of a very mediocre selection.

Over the next two days, the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate continued to plough their way through the poisoned toffee. Really, I wouldn't have been surprised if the toffees had been hand-delivered by an ancient and cackling crone bearing a basket of too-shiny apples. They were that bad. But not eating them simply never occurred to my team-mates. Even separating out the green abominations wasn't an option. I suggested doing exactly that so we'd have something to offer visiting clients or management, but when the others realised that by this point they'd have almost no non-green ones left (a good thing, surely?) they decided this was going too far.

(During all this, the Stress Fiend went through her daily ritual of buying the same kind of toxic hamburger from the cafeteria each day for lunch, muttering her version of Grace before eating it - "Oh, I'm so going to regret this. I just know it will come back on me later" - and then spending the rest of the day moaning about heartburn. Can you see a pattern emerging?)


And in the latest installment (post heartburn-burger) the Stress Fiend declares loudly "Those green ones really are the worst." She sounds suspiciously like she's chewing.

"Are you eating another one?"

"I have to. There are too many green ones now, and I need to even the numbers out."

Literal transcriptions, continued

"These are clowns, these bloody wossnames at ... these bloody wossnames at bloody ... at down bloody wossname down there!"

Ghouls (no punchline here - move along).

I think we're on firm ground in stating that La Mondaine is a ghoul. The only way she could be more of one would be if she hung around graveyards and had chunks of cadaver caught between her teeth, but here's the latest example, anyway.

Several weeks ago a couple of people in another part of the organisation were involved in a serious car accident. This is like heroin for La Mondaine and she begins relentlessly pumping people for details - she doesn't even know the pair that well and the kind of questions she's asking make it clear that she's had nothing to do with either of them in the last several years at least. Nevertheless, every detail is of vital importance. When another elderly colleague ambles by for his twice-weekly gossip session, she pounces on him for information.

"Who was driving? Was he hurt much? He wasn't? Oh, he must feel so awful. Does he feel awful? I'm sure he must. Tell me how awful he's feeling. I'd ask his wife, but she's taken time off to look after him while he recovers. He has to feel terrible, though. Are you sure you haven't heard how much guilt and suffering he's going through? Tell me everything you know about his pain! I must know! I want to wallow in it!"

It's not pretty. And then she switches to the more seriously-injured of the pair, who's still in hospital.

"Have you heard from him? Have you heard about him? Oh, it must be so awful for him! It must be so awful for his family! Does he have children? He does? Oh, the poor children! Oh, his poor wife what's-her-name! How is she coping. Has she told you how she's coping? It  must be hard for her. She must be suffering. How much is she suffering? A lot? More than a lot? How would you not despair? How could you keep going? Her anguish must reach to the heavens, so how can she possibly bear it? And with the kids, too!"

"Nah," says the elderly gossip. The other one, that is. "She's German." (Because apparently Germans are soulless, unemotional machines that just keep going regardless).

"She's not suffering? How can she not be? Tell me she is! She must be suffering in the face of this tragedy! Why is she not sharing her pain and stress with the rest of us like a normal person? Does she not understand that we hunger for her pain and are suffering, too? If I can't lick the fresh tears of grief from the faces of her and her children, why can no-one at least quantify her suffering for me, so that I can rest easy at night like the horrid Pain Vampire that I am?"

She may not have used those exact words, granted, but her morbid need to indulge and wallow in someone else's misfortune was genuinely sickening. She may even have dropped below the threshold separating the merely contemptible from the disgusting.

I have no punchline for this. It turns out there's no humour to be found here, not even in mocking her foibles. La Mondaine may well be the first complete failure as a human being it's been my misfortune to work alongside.

Killjoy was here

The Stress Fiend is away again, which means I'm once more forced to rummage through the offal of her deranged work practices. This time around, though, I get to have some petty revenge (above and beyond simply blogging about her foibles) and spoil her fun by actioning a request she's been sitting on out of spite for a fortnight because she doesn't like the person who placed it.

And I know this wasn't a simple oversight on her part, because I overheard her gloating about it the other day to a less-than-loyal underling of her victim.

Ravings

The Stress Fiend is many things. One of her more surprising guises is Language Purist, something that dovetails neatly with her instant rage at clients with foreign accents and young people who use text-message abbreviations in casual emails and instant message sessions. It's a testament to her ... uh ... well, something about her, anyway, that she doesn't let her own borderline literacy and general incoherence get in the way of condemning the linguistic shortcomings of others.

It also makes statements like this all the more bemusing (and this is an exact quote):

"Oh, that's right. That was another of those goddamn frigging wossname bloody ones, isn't it?"

I'm not even going to pretend to try to understand what that one was about.

Just another day...

Another week gets underway.

The Stress Fiend appears to have arrived pre-enraged. She looks at a job for us in the service desk queue and immediately begins ranting at the client:

"Oh. Oh! You only want the standard headset with that order, do you? Well, guess what, you stupid bitch - that's exactly what you're going to get!"

Because nothing puts a client in their place like shouting abuse at a written message and then giving them exactly what they want. Having dealt with that, she moves on to the next one, and proceeds to angrily denounce someone for not placing a request through us that they was never meant to go through our unit in the first place. I mention this to her.

"THAT'S NOT THE POINT!"

But I'm afraid - justifiably, I think - to ask what the point actually is, and let it go.

La Mondaine, meanwhile, is honing her comedic skills by pronouncing "PC" as "pissy" and then repeating it anxiously, hoping someone will notice and tell her how funny she is.

(If they don't find it funny, then they obviously have Asperger's syndrome. La Mondaine has conveniently divided the world into two kinds of people: normal people like her, and those with Asperger's. Turns out the latter make up a far larger percentage of the population than the so-called experts would have you believe. Who knew?)

Boldly plumbing new depths

La Mondaine has no sense of tact or what's socially appropriate. This is not news and, in fact, we can take this as the kind of universal constant that the Einsteins and Hawkings of the world can only dream of discovering.

However there are still moments when she somehow manages to go above and beyond the call, as she apparently felt obliged to demonstrate yet again recently:

"Hey! Remember that time your wife found the body of someone who'd just committed suicide? Wasn't it so horrible? Let's revisit it in excruciating detail while we're queuing in a crowded cafeteria and pore over how upsetting it was for everyone!"

It's one of those "need to know" things..

Because we've been officially understaffed since the start of this year, and unofficially understaffed since the start of last year, things get missed or held up. It's unavoidable, and it's been such a long, long struggle to fill the empty position that I've stopped letting it worry me when aspects of the team's role I'm not responsible for start to fall apart (which is why this pretty much sums up my attitude to the escalation notices from the service desk.

Senior management have received a complaint from a client about a request they submitted and which no-one's responded to yet, and a Sternly Worded Email (also overly-long, weirdly formal and excessively pompous) has descended to our level.

The Invertebrate consults with the Stress Fiend.

"The client says they've tried to ring several times but no-one's answered and no-one's called him back," he reads from the email.

"They always say that. You know what clients are like." She gestures towards the phone. The LED that indicates voice mail is dark. "See? No messages."

I note, though, that she carefully omits the bit about how she keeps turning the voice mail off so that clients can't leave messages...

Stupid *and* otherworldly

Somehow I managed to tune this out last week when it originally happened, but La Mondaine shared her secret to successful speed-reading: "It's easy. You just teach yourself to ignore the consonants."

The Stress Fiend related this gem to me. There was a couple of seconds' while I tried to imagine this in practice, followed by a good several minutes of helpless laughter and another hour of sudden, intermittent sniggering.

So with that in mind, I give you Hamlet , Act III, Scene 1 (the "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy) as interpreted by La Mondaine:

O e, o o o e--a i e eio:
ee 'i oe i e i o e
e i a ao o oaeo oe
O o ae a aai a ea o oe
A ooi e e. o ie, o ee--
o oe--a a ee o a e e
e eaae, a e oa aa o
a e i ei o. 'i a oaio
eo o e ie. o ie, o ee--
o ee--eae o ea: a, ee' e,
o i a ee o ea a ea a oe
e e ae e o i oa oi,
ie ae. ee' e ee
a ae aai o o o ie.
o o o ea e i a o o ie,
' oeo' o, e o a' oe
e a o eie oe, e a' ea,
e ioee o oie, a e
a aie ei o ' o ae,
e e ie i i ie ae
i a ae oi? o o ae ea,
o a ea e a ea ie,
a e ea o oei ae ea,
e ioee o, o oe o
o aee e, e e i,
A ae ae ea oe i e ae
a o oe a e o o o?
oiee oe ae oa o a,
A e aie e o eoio
I iie o'e i e ae a o o,
A eeie o ea i a oe
i i ea ei e a
A oe e ae o aio. -- o o o,
e ai Oeia! -- , i oio
e a i eeee.

If Cthulhu tried to yodel "Old MacDonald Had A Farm", this is what it would sound like.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

By now it's been fairly well-established that when it comes to dealing with the Stress Fiend, there are no winners.

Clients are excoriated for not reading and following instructions and then, when they do follow the Stress Fiend's instructions to the letter and the instructions are wrong, it's still their fault for failing to read her mind.

Ted E. was routinely snarled at for palming work on to her, and was just as routinely snarled at for touching anything she wanted control of, whether or not anyone knew it was "her" work and whether or not what she wanted it for made any sense.

Now she's decided to elevate things to a new level of crazy. Yesterday afternoon she suddenly began ranting about being invited to a meeting about a project to streamline and standardise purchasing and deploying software to our clients.

"Just who does this person think they are, inviting me to a meeting?"

It's hard to work out quite what had her so enraged, as (unsurprisingly) she'd have been apoplectic if the project had made any decisions about this without consulting anyone in the team responsible for a fairly important part of the process. But rant she did, at great length, and right up until it was time to leave.

I walk in this morning to find her raving at The Invertebrate about it, even angrier and more inarticulate than she was yesterday afternoon. How does she maintain the rage like that without inducing a stroke? Or does she just walk in through the door in the mornings, flip her inner Berserker Fury switch to the 'on' position and go for it?

"How dare they ask me to contribute anything to this? Where do they get off inviting me to a meeting without even asking me first if I want to come to a meeting in the first place? I've a good mind to just refuse to go at all!"

And in that last exclamation lies a hint of the method beneath the madness.

Because if she doesn't attend the meeting, she has a ready source of Rage Fuel for when the project inevitably makes a recommendation that doesn't take into account something we need to do here and it will be all their fault.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned, in fact, by simple proximity.

Something in the water?

Context is all-important, but even for this place the last few days have been utterly deranged. The Stress Fiend likes to claim that the lunatics are running the asylum, but I'm not sure that's the case. If my workplace is anything to go by, they've either reduced the amount of anti-psychotics in the water supply, or increased them to dangerous levels.

The Stress Fiend was in explosive form at the tail end of  last week:

"I can't believe how much paper we have to waste printing off all this stuff just to satisfy some outdated and arbitrary process that everyone but me wants to get rid of! This place is unbelievable!"

"What  do you mean you didn't know about that arbitrary and undocumented charge I've been adding to random orders for some clients and not others?"


... and around the same time I had to convince her that no, I hadn't seen the new Elmo doll, nor had I been keeping up with the latest developments in Two And A Half Men.

I retaliated by throwing tricky, work-related questions at her, because I am nothing if not subtle:

"Has that purchase order to renew the support on some business-critical systems gone out yet?"

"Oh! No! I'd have had it out hours ago if someone hadn't made waste hours trying to work out what was wrong with their software!"

Except ... the only person who "made" her do that, was her. And she's had this order on her desk for a week.

Five minutes later: "Arrhhh! This software installation is still failing in exactly the same way everyone's been telling me it fails!"

And now, with La Mondaine back in the office, we're experiencing a perfect storm of stupidity, starting with the two of them trying to locate some old software.


"Who makes Corel Draw software?"

"I think it's Corel."

"Really? Are you sure? Who used to make it?"

"I'm pretty sure it used to be Corel..." They drag me into it. "Who used to make Corel Draw?"

"Corel Draw? I'm fairly confident Corel have always made Corel Draw."

They go back to discussing it aomngst themselves, seeing as I'm clearly being no help. Searching the internet for answers is no help, because while Corel claim on their website that they make it, what would they know?

"Are you sure it's not Autodesk?"

I'm not sure what causes them to admit defeat, but eventually they concede the software is actually made by the company whose name it's borne for the last twenty years. Now they have to try to find the installation discs which, you may recall, has been one of the things La Mondaine is meant to have been working on for the last year or so.

The Stress Fiend looks expectantly at La Mondaine. "Well?"

La Mondaine looks guilty. "Well... I might not have filed all those CDs absolutely exactly in order just yet ..."

Eventually the discs are retrieved .. from the large plastic disposal bin where La Mondaine had thrown them in a frenzy of getting rid of what she considers "old" software. So whatever absolutely exact filing system she thinks she's using, the madness:method ratio is gravely unbalanced.

It's a hellish way to start the week.

Because it's important to be *seen* to be busy.

We've discovered why a lot of clients and techs have been reporting problems getting a particular piece of software to run. La Mondaine has been providing the installation discs but, because she hasn't been able to find copies of the right version, has been sending people the wrong version instead on the vague principle that it's better than keeping them waiting.

The Stress Fiend plans to ask her about this. I don't think it's going to be worth the pain.

An unhealthy obssession, or an obssession with unhealth?

La Mondaine has a terrible fascination with the workings of her innards. At the same time, she's never really quite grasped the concepts of personal boundaries or workplace-appropriate conversation topics, and whenever she experiences bowel problems she feels she not only has to share this information with the rest of us, but needs to find other sufferers with whom she can trade stories. It doesn't matter if she knows the other people or not; she'll keep asking the people she does know until she can find someone who's been sick lately so she can try to compare symptoms by proxy.

So when The Invertebrate's children are sick over the weekend and he mentions feeling a bit ill himself, La Mondaine can't let the chance pass.

"What was it? What did they have?"

"Oh, it was just a tummy bug. The kind of thing young kids always pick up when someone drops a sick kid off at kindy."

"So what did you have?"

"I was just feeling a bit crook, that's all," he says evasively, belatedly realising he's already on the slippery slope and the conversation can only go in one direction from here.

"Were there stomach cramps?"

"Not really. I just wasn't feeling that great."

"Were you vomiting?"

"... No ..." (Getting nervous now.)

She leans forward with a dreadful, eager intensity, "Was there diarrhea?"

"No!" He laughs uncomfortably and beats a hasty retreat into his office.

But La Mondaine is on a roll and will not be thwarted so easily.

"What about you?" she asks, turning to me.

"What?"

"Weren't you away sick?"

"No."

"But your kids were sick, weren't they?"

"One of them was, about two months ago."

"Did they have ... The Runs?"

I think something has snapped.

The Stress Fiend is having one of her special days. Granted, it's increasingly difficult these days to remain motivated and focused considering it's now been twenty months since we knew Ted E. was leaving and ten months since he actually left (in body - he was absent mentally for several years before that), and his position remains unfilled. Even so, the Stress Fiend almost seems to be making a special effort today.

She starts by abandoning any attempt to reason things through by herself. This would almost be a mercy if it didn't mean that she wanted me to do all her thinking for her, with a bit of mind-reading thrown in on the side.

"What does this client mean? There are two options, and I don't know what he wants me to order!" She looks again at the request that's come through. "Should I buy him this one?"

"We don't need to buy that - we're already covered for it everywhere."

"So I should buy him the other one?"

"Only if it's what he actually needs. He might want the first one, but just doesn't know he doesn't need to order it in."

"So he wants the first one? I should buy that for him?"

"No, because we don't need to buy that."

(The obvious solution to her quandary is to just call the client and ask him to clarify what he's after, but I'm morbidly curious to see how long it takes for this to occur to her).

"So I should buy him the other option?"

"Only if that's what he actually wants."

"Is that what he wants?"

"I. Don't. Know."

She vacillates anxiously for several minutes more before finally accepting that I either can't or won't read the client's mind on her behalf, and settles the matter with a phone call that takes less than a minute.

Exhausted by the ordeal, she decides she doesn't want to do her work anymore and decides to try her hand at technical support. Now ... there are some problems we can fix, because they're known bugs within our organisation and because, apparently unlike a large number of our techs, we know how to use a search engine to see what the solution may be. We don't do tech support - or try not to, at least - because that's not what we're here for and the more time we spend providing technical support to technical support, the less time we're actually able to do what we're meant to do, and the more it's expected that we're here to hold the techs' hands when they get confused.

(If it sounds like I'm being unduly harsh on our techs ... well, possibly I am. But a large number of them still live in the days when their job consisted of replacing defective physical parts, and even the younger ones seem to struggle with the concept that their role moved beyond that a decade ago).

The Stress Fiend knows all this, complains loudly whenever a technical question comes our way, and decides she's going to leap in and solve a recent problem that's been passed through to us rather than the support area it should have gone to, and where I tell her she should send it. She then spends over an hour monkeying around trying to download and compile an installation package that I tell her at the outset isn't what we need, successfully duplicates the lack of success in getting it to work, and then can't get any further.

Unwilling to let the matter go or pass it on to the technical staff who are paid more than she is to deal with exactly that kind of stuff, she decides to phone the software's publisher instead. It doesn't go well. The Stress Fiend isn't good at explaining things at the best of times, and the number she calls takes her to an international call centre.

I go for a walk, and come back to find the Stress Fiend off the phone, but agitated. It's hard to understand quite what she's saying, but it sounds like her tinkering has somehow corrupted or invalidated the license keys used across our organisation. I'm not even sure how that's possible, but whatever she did, she managed to alarm the call-centre people so much they're organising replacement keys and installation discs.

And then she passes the job on to our technical people...

Now she's just sitting at her desk happily blurting out random thoughts as they cross her mind.

"Peri peri sauce! What's the thing with peri peri sauce? Why is everyone making things with it now? I don't like peri peri sauce..."

The worst part is that she seems to expect a response to this.

Hell: not circles, but open plan.

One of the teams sharing our large, open-plan workspace is responsible for managing phone and data services. There's some irony, then, that they only communicate amongst themselves by shouting, even where there's not actually a cubicle wall separating the people having the conversation.

This afternoon's loud and animated discussion takes place amongst the women of the team, treating everyone else in the area to the exciting world of domestic farting: by their husbands & boyfriends, by their children ... and by themselves.

This is why I don't socialise much with the other teams at work. What's there left to talk about?

"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.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But what should I do with the labels?"

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

"Take them off," he confirms.

"But they're on the cases!"

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

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

"But they're not our cases!"

"Exactly."

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

"No, because they're our labels."

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

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

Explaining the obvious

"That's not available to staff members."

"So how do they get it?"

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

Some questions should never be asked

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

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

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

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

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

Life's little miracles

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

Gone, but not forgotten.

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

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


*****

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

*****

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

No-one deserves this.

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

...

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

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

Get off of my cloud.

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

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

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

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

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

Complete Loss Of User Data

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

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

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

Destroying the Precious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucky me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

"What year are we in?"

"..."

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

"Exactly."

"But it might come back to bite me!"

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'd wear an oxygen mask!"

"That wouldn't help with explosive gas."

"I'd attach an air-hose!"

- WTF? -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Après le déluge, La Mondaine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the high ground

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

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

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

Oh, 2011, I hate you already...

A general plea to clients:

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

Welcome to 2011

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

"Just as a reinstall."

"But that's not an option."

So why are you asking me as though it is?