From Russia, with Love?

I could try to summarise the last few months: the dramas with a workmate I shall henceforth dub The Stress Fiend, the ongoing joy of working with Ted E., strange things suppliers do that they think are helpful (a tip - if you've got a Hawaiian shirt, try hanging around random loading bays and see how much free stuff you can score), and numerous other hijinx associated with life in a poorly-funded organisation with neglected infrastructure, eccentric hiring practices, and a fondness for inventing problems before they happen while not worrying about addressing real problems before they bite...

But that's a lot of effort. So instead I'll ease back into things by making fun of the spam I've received lately.

Alena from Russia writes in "Surprise from Russia":

I am from Russia. I am 30 years. Recently I with girlfriend have climbed in the Internet and have seen this site.

Presumably climbing the internet is how people describe web-surfing in countries where it's too cold to actually surf. In fact the cold air would also explain certain aspects of the photos Alena attached to her email. Alternatively people find this site much more stimulating than I could have imagined, which makes me wonder if I should tone down my writing style somewhat.

I was on different sites, but it has liked me also I has decided to write.

Alena can has chezburger?

Ekaterina, also from Russia, writes in "I think you'll like it!":

Hello!!! My name is Ekaterina, I a 25 years old. I live in country Russia , in Chistopol city.

Never heard of Chistopol? Neither had I, but I looked it up, it's real (who says spam can't be educational?), and I can understand why Ekaterina would want to get out of there. Ekaterina has never contacted me again, so presumably these pictures of Vladimir Putin have convinced her that she needn't look abroad to find true love after all.

The Lonely Woman from Russia Anna (I kid you not, that's how she refers to herself throughout) writes in an email of the same name:

I understand that you now are surprised that to you this letter has come.

Not as surprised as I might have been if Alena and Ekaterina hadn't beaten you to the punch. These days I'm surprised when I don't get emails from Russia with love (or, at least, negotiable affection). Interestingly, Anna tells me that in Russia there are 30,000,000 women living without men. Considering that's several million more women than there are people living in Australia, that's a difficult number to conceptualise. Frankly, I'm not sure why Russia just doesn't clone Vladimir 30,000,000 times and be done with it.

Alina, also from - surprise - Russia, writes to me with "Let's have communication", although the tone of her email makes me wonder whether "communication" isn't a euphemism:

I want to get acquainted with you. I will be very glad if we will have fine dialogue ... If you wish to have dialogue with me then write to me and I shall be glad to have dialogue with you.

And, I have to admit, I was almost tempted, because who doesn't mind a good bit of dialogue now and then? But in the photos she attached (sitting at a table in a restaurant), it looks like Jack Bauer sitting at a table behind her and I don't believe in that kind of coincidence, especially given that Bauer now operates with the blessing of at least one member of the American Supreme Court. Who wants to take that kind of risk?

Meanwhile, in the attention-getting stakes:

The curiously-named u66daji fights it out with ashorty but, as attention-grabbers go, his exhortation that I should "type to clank flatulence" really isn't an incentive to open his/her message, and even after doing so I'm not quite sure what he/she was trying to sell me. ashorty's more aggressive approach ("So listen lapdog!") is, frankly, taking the hard sell to ridiculous extremes and was equally incoherent.

I'm thinking "42" might be the way to go...

"I need you to redraft this email that your minion wrote. I want it to say something different."

"Okay. What would you like it to say?"

"Something more meaningful that we can use as standard response to queries about this in future."

"Okay, but what would you like it to say?"

"Something better. Something people can understand."

"About what?"

"What your minion wrote. But different. Make it universally applicable. And concise."

"Universally applicable but concise."

"Exactly. And unambiguous, too."

Uh-huh.

So far, so good...

... to quote the captain of the Titanic.

One week down and my role as team leader has caused neither open revolt amongst my minions (although I'm keeping a close eye on Ted E.) nor catastrophic systems failure amongst the things I'm supposed to be looking after.

Or, at least, amongst the things I think I'm supposed to be looking after. Despite having several weeks where we could conduct a formal handover process, everything the outgoing manager felt I needed to know was condensed into a one-hour session where I was shown two large white folders full of emails and printouts, and proudly told "In one day's time, all this will be yours." The actual details of what I'm meant to be doing through the course of the day (or, indeed, how I'm meant to be doing it) remain vague. Given that I'm not being paid any more for supervising three minions, I'm assuming that what I'm meant to be doing is limited to "everything except anything that might mean having to pay you extra".

Ted E. has been in good form, however, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn his job satisfaction has taken a bit of a hit.

• First of all he tried to convince the outgoing manager that because he was taking over a once-a-week task that our two-days-a-week casual does, he should be able to offload most of his full-time duties onto someone else. Perhaps surprisingly, this didn't work.
  
  
• After all the stress and anguish of an office refurbishment and relocation of furniture (the outgoing manager had the well-intentioned if naive idea that everyone should be consulted about the new cube farm), we were told we needed to fit another desk in the area. Floor plans were consulted, common sense was referred to (no, really), and it was decided that Ted E.'s vast desk would need to be replaced with a normal-sized one to allow another person to sit at his end of our enclosure. A full week later, when final arrangements are being made, Ted E. announces that he's not in favour of this and tries to veto the desk-swap through sheer stubborness. Our casual, sick of endless discussions about the refurbishment, nearly had to be restrained from leaping across the intervening space and throttling him.
  In the end it was agreed that as Ted E. currently occupies twice as much floor space as anyone else, he has to be the one to lose some ground (which is exactly the same reasoning that led to the idea being proposed in the first place, but it was important to have a one hour meeting to reach this point again). Of course Ted E. had already wandered off to afternoon tea by this point (it's his usual strategy when he doesn't get his way in a meeting - slip away "to answer the phone", and then slip away a little further, etc.) so as far as he knows the idea is for us to work out a viable alternative to him being reduced to the same workspace as the rest of us. But Ted E. is the only one with an interest in doing this, and he hasn't come up with anything, so come next Monday morning he's in for an unwelcome surprise that will probably send him home early with a headache.
  
  
• "I can't find these files on the server. Where are they?"
  "Stored under the relevant supplier. Everything was really inconsistent before."
  "I don't know who the supplier is."
  [I tell him].
  "I'm just going to rename the folder so I can find this again."
  "No! We're not renaming stuff. That's how things got into a mess in the first place."
  "Can I just rename it a little bit, then, so I can recognise it next time?"
  
  
• "There's an email just come in to the shared mailbox. It's relevant to some other emails that are in there." Subtext: "I've been waiting for someone else to deal with them, and now I'm waiting for someone else to deal with this one. But I'm not going to say that out loud."
  

"Uh, is this thing on?"

Sad to say (well, only in the most masochistic, don't-want-to-disappoint-what-remains-of-my-audience kind of way) that things have been relatively sane and dull at work lately. There's only been the standard, everyday havoc going on around me and very little of the malevolent lunacy that seems to stalk me from workplace to workplace.

Of course, Ted E. was away for six weeks, which accounts for part of it...

And the more volatile of our casuals also declared about a month or so ago that she was leaving and never coming back. (Thus far she's kept her word, but her memory remains in the form of drunken dinosaur-like footprints throughout our database. Any time something occurs that makes no sense, enrages the clients, and breaks something, we can usually find her user ID stamped somewhere on the records).

So, while not exactly a Golden Age (don't make me rant about being trapped in a shared office the size of a glorified broom cupboard while half a dozen people pile in to have a meeting with my cell-mate) it's been a relatively peaceful and dull time in the old cube farm. In a grinding, shifting-goalposts/too-many-demands/not-enough-staff way, at least.

But, fear not, for good news is at hand!

It's all a bit subject to negotiation at the moment (and negotiation at my workplace tends to be conducted along the lines of upper management gloating in Bond-villain fashion while dangling you over an elaborate deathtrap), but ...

I may end up managing Ted E. (and a couple of other minions) for the rest of the year.

Accounting, Ted E.-style

One of the sources of stress for my manager over recent months has been the wild fluctuations in the money available in our sections accounts. Part of this was due to the money laundering that was taking place, and upper management helping themselves to our funds when they needed a little extra for other projects elsewhere, but both practices were more or less brought under control when upper management discovered they'd been found out.

But the fluctuations continued, and money continued to inexplicably drain away. Until yesterday...

We're looking at a new function in our tracking and purchasing system. Ted E. looks over my shoulder and points to an account number.

"That's wrong. It always keeps coming up with that number when I'm doing the accounts, and it's wrong."

Manager and 2iC look at each other. "Uh, that's our account name, Ted. It's been that for nearly eighteen months now."

"Oh, really? I've just been changing it so the money goes to these other accounts where I think it belongs."

"For eighteen months?"

"Well nobody told me..."

"Eighteen months, Ted! You thought there was a bug in the system for eighteen months and didn't say anything?"

"Welll ... it was just easier to do it this way and not tell anyone that I was siphoning money off to other accounts..."

The Learning Cliff

Manager (in search of Ted E.): "Where is he? Has he gone home already?"

Me: "Well it is ten past three..."

Manager looks at me, trying to tell if I'm joking.

"Did he tell anyone he was planning to leave early?"

Remaining workmate and I confer briefly. "Yes ... yes, he did. At about quarter to three."

"Oh. I needed to ask him about something. There's also an e-mail I needed to talk to the two of you about, following on from what we were discussing earlier ... only now I can't find it."

"It's been filed!" I pronounce ominously. Ted E. has taken to filing e-mails, using a hidden formula known only to himself and Dan Brown.

"No, it hasn't," says our manager, "That's what I thought, too, but I tried a global search and it didn't turn up."

The global search apparently doesn't encompass the "deleted" folder, because that's where I find it a few minutes later.

"Found it," I announce cheerfully.

"Where? No, don't tell me." There's a pinched look of pain on my manager's face that I haven't seen before, but which is oddly familiar from the Cow-orker workplace. "I think I need to talk to Ted E. about this in the morning."

My manager hasn't so much hit the Ted E. learning curve as smacked straight into the Ted E. cliff-face.

A pointy-haired moment

Argh.

Manager: "When I told you to contact these people, I meant 'contact these people, plus another unspecified group'. Did you read my mind, and have you heard from the unspecified group yet?"

Me: "Er... no."

Manager: "Then I think you need to get on with that urgently."

In an ideal world.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you're going to insist other parts of the organisation turn over all their activities in a particular area to your management, that you'd make sure beforehand that if you didn't already have the means of managing that task properly, you acquired it pretty damned quickly and made sure you were able to deliver on what you were promising.

You'd think...

Ted E., Man of Action

The two beliefs that drive Ted E. at work are: give the client what they want, and act immediately.

Unfortunately this tends to fall down tragically when:

1. what the client wants isn't what they need or are entitled to;
2. Ted E. doesn't understand what the client wants;
3. Ted E. doesn't actually read the client's email and acts immediately to give them what he thinks they want.

Hi-jinx ensue.

Thinking outside the box ... way outside...

Oh dear. Ted E. has been "thinking outside the box" in a bid to get out of doing work that requires engaging brain cells.

"I know doing it this way is more secure and more accurate, but can't we go for convenience instead so I don't have to spend twenty seconds looking up a database to verify confidential information?"

Data consistency is for lesser beings...

Argh. I'm glad that's over with for now.

I've just finished (I think) doing some data cleanup to fix the problem of half-a-dozen products being erroneously labeled with around 30-odd different combinations. That just sounds painful, rather than difficult, so throw in the fact that the software vendor restructured its licensing and sales model twice over that period and youll start to get an idea of how "interesting" the task turned out to be.

And then consider that the next time Ted E. goes into the database, he'll look at what I've done, decide it's too hard to understand and that consistency of data within a database is only a guideline (and a loose one at that), and begin creating new and wonderful product descriptions all over again...

Holy Wars: the Innate Superiority of The Mac

Let me just preface this by saying first that I really don't care what type of computer people use as long as it gets the job done. However...

A co-worker uses a Mac. Up until yesterday he also had to use a PC, because while his Mac could run the Microsoft Access application critical to much of our work (provided he was running a virtual Windows machine), it couldn't connect to the Oracle database that sat behind the Access front-end.

So he ran both a PC and a Mac to get around this, until yesterday when he, a tech, and a senior tech spent two hours trying to establish a connection to a database. Eventually it succeeded, but at a conservative estimate the exercise cost somewhere in the vicinity of $200 to $300. That's purely in terms of wages, and doesn't take into account the things they didn't do during that time because they were concentrating on getting one Mac to duplicate the functions of an existing Windows machine.

All good now, though? Well, no, because now he has to get Lotus Notes working properly under the virtual Windows machine, because otherwise he has to deal with the Lotus web interface and its various idiosyncrasies. But at least now he's down to using only one computer (most of the time), and after another couple of hundred dollars in salaries are consumed, he might be able to do everything he wants on his Mac.

By running all the critical systems through a virtual Windows machine.

Stupidity and The War On Me

I believe I may have to kill Ted E. shortly. The system we use here is set up with a product-prices hierarchy - that is, the database (you knew this was going to involve databases at some point, didn't you?) contains a record for a particular product, with sub-records that reflect the different models under which it can be ordered, e.g. single user, 5-user etc.

I discovered a couple of weeks back that there was a particular product suite that was proving difficult to track because Ted E. had created it as a subset of another product from the same company (a quick analogy would be listing Microsoft Office as being a subset of Microsoft Word). I tried to convince him not to do this because it wasn't just contrary to how the database is supposed to work, it's just plain wrong. But he didn't want to change it, because that requires a lot messing about to update all the records.

So I create new product entires in the database to match what the orders should be, so he can use it for future reference (he wasn't interested in trying to understand the way the products were sold, so I had to set them up myself - no big problem, because at least that way I know they're done right).

Now I find the ignorant bugger is still doing it, "because that's how I did it last time". In other words, it's more convenient for him if he keeps entering incorrect data rather than apply a little brain power - not a lot, just selecting something from a drop-down list - and do it right.

And I know when I take this to him shortly and explain again what's gone wrong, two things will happen:

• he'll react with injured innocence and repeat that he's just ordering it how it's always been ordered, and if we get the right stuff in the end, what's the harm?
• my blood pressure will soar, and I'll be fighting the urge to break office furniture over his head.

Cow-orker: the energizer bunny of stupidity

Cow-orker to an e-mail list reaching a dozen or so separate organisations:

"Hi everyone. We've received some documents under a non-disclosure agreement that we're concerned about. What do you think?"

And, sure enough, two of the three documents attached to the e-mail are clearly marked as being under NDA, not for circulation outside of vendor-controlled forums, etc.

This comes only a couple of months after she placed confidential vendor information on a publicly-accessible website because it was easier than relaying the information directly to the individuals affected by it.

The Crazy Man Revisited

Ten days ago a call went out on a closed, inter-organisational e-mail list asking for participants in a trial programme. Over the next day or two, a small handful volunteered to be guinea-pigs.

This morning the Crazy Man finally sends through his response. "Sorry for the late reply," he begins, "but I'm in a conference in Sydney and they're having trouble getting the wireless network connected..."

And the thing is - I'm not sure whether this is just a lame excuse (because even he can't pull off ten days of consecutive conference time), or if what he's making a Freudian slip and telling everyone he only replied at all because he isn't able to web-surf right now...

Cow-orker: you can lead a cow-orker to water ...

... but it's still illegal to drown them.*

"I want to send an e-mail to everyone saying they need to stop using this product and switch to products that I say are okay!"

"Wouldn't you rather just tell them they need to consider alternatives to the current product, and not get flamed by the users?"

"Um ... no, I don't think so. My way is better."

---

* From the archives.

So, yeah... I'm back.

The World of Warcraft ate my life. Sorry. Now back to the other things that eat my life, but are far less fun and can't be resolved by hitting them with a broadsword (except on a very temporary basis).

Ahhh! I kill you!

They say: "If you hit problems with this, don't spend more than a couple of hours on it. We're paying them for support we never use, so we may as well use it this time."

Two days later I say: "We don't know how to make it do this. None of the documentation even mentions it, so we don't know if it's even technically possible in the first place. Everything's on hold until we can get this resolved - can we call the company and get them to help us?"

They say: "Look it up on Google. We're not getting support in just to help you out."

I'm still here

I have a workmate. Let's call him Ted E., because he talks just like Ted E. Bare

"This is quite complex. Earlier on you were looking at something that I've now decided looked like this, so I'll give this to you to work out."

I look at it. Get a headache. Make sense of it. I take it back to Ted E. and try to explain to him why it's complex and how it can be handled. Ted E. looks pained.

"Yes ... yes... All I was trying to show you was that it was complicated. So I've been doing it this way."

"This way", unfortunately, is the wrong way and involves labelling something as something else which it clearly isn't, and then trying to treat it as such. Not surprisingly this isn't working terribly well, hence the complexity of the problem he's raised.

"Well," I try to begin, "perhaps what we need to do is start by calling this what it is, and then building on that."

Ted E. looks confused. "But I've been doing it this way." (For some reason I begin getting flashbacks to Spinal Tap and their speakers that go up to 11.)

"That's what I'm saying. Maybe we need to look at doing it a different way that's a better reflection of what it actually is."

"That's why I was trying to show you how complicated it is, and why this is what I've been doing with it."

Let's try again. "It is complicated, which is why I think we need to consider doing it differently and treating it as something that's distinct from what it's been treated as so far."

Pause. Ted E. frowns slightly. "But this is what I've been doing with it."

He catches my look of pained frustration and misinterprets it completely. "It is very complicated, like I showed you. How about you go away for a while and think about the best way to tackle it?"

It's like wrestling with a giant sponge - as soon as I get tired of applying any pressure, he springs back into his original shape.

Not dead yet.

No, I'm not dead. Yes, I've been slack. But things have been happening, and I've been persistently unwell (over it now), and it's possible I may soon be leaving for Cow-orker free pastures once again (like I haven't tried that one before).

For the last few months I've been working two jobs - one, wrangling the Cow-orker; the other, doing similar work (minus Cow-orker wrangling) at another organisation. My week's been split in half between the two, which has limited my exposure to the Cow-orker. It also means that my working week now very clearly has a sane part, and a crazed, irrational part where my day is dominated by the Cow-orker and the Crazy Man. If I didn't know better, I'd swear someone was trying to conduct bizarre psychology experiments on me.

In fact I don't know better. Hmm...

Anyway, the two jobs situation looks set to end shortly (unless the Crazy Man pulls something bizarre and HR-related from someplace unthinkable) and in the near future I'll almost certainly be moving full-time to the sane workplace. It has its own quirks, to be sure, but there are no prominent Cow-orkers, Project Managers, or sequels to Project Death Spiral lurking in the offing. All I need for them to do now is to work out quite what they want me to do there on an ongoing basis. And then, of course, make sure it's an ongoing basis and not just something that wil evaporate at the end of the year.

But what this means is that once again (ha-hah) I'm facing the prospect of having dramatically less to post here.

This hasn't been helped by the fact that the Cow-orker herself has actually gone slightly sane. No, really. She's just separated from The Spouse, and the lack of mutual insanity at home seems to have made her slightly more rational at work. Slightly. And there are signs that it's wearing off already, so it's possible that she's going to continue her random acts of berserker stupidity in the workplace, but in different ways. But, as I've said, unless the Crazy Man acts fast to keep me there, I'm not going to be directly exposed to the madness.

So that's where things are at right now. There'll be a random smattering of updates to come as I begin ploughing through recent e-mails and catch up on things.

Cow-orker: Client torture

Hot off the phone to the dentist, the Cow-orker is wondering why a client is giving her grief for giving him instructions for installing software that can't possibly work on his computer.

I try to explain to her the reason the instructions she's given him can't possibly work on his computer: she knows he's using a Mac, yet she keeps giving him instructions for installing the software under Windows with the advice that "but this is how it works under Windows!" and is struggling to grasp why he doesn't find this helpful. Because his response ("This won't work for me because it doesn't work this way on a Mac") isn't enough of a hint.

She's dismissed him as being too much of a pain to deal with, and has gone to morning tea to de-stress from the whole situation.

Cow-orker: medical histories

The Spawn has a dental appointment after a checkup revealed it needed a vast amount of fillings. Despite The Spawn's sugar-rich diet, the Cow-orker seems surprised and has been on the phone to the dentist for the last fifteen minutes.

So far the hapless dentist has been advised that The Spawn is an "exceptionally perceptive" child, and that the dentist shouldn't make the mistake of treating the wunderkind like any normal five-year old. Apparently comforting lies are okay, however, as the Cow-orker has been telling The Spawn that having half-a-dozen fillings won't hurt and she won't feel a thing. The trouble is, she's just discovered from talking to the dentist that it will, in fact, hurt (anaesthetic needles still being needles, after all) and is trying to get the dentist to give her a way out of the situation.

Exactly how she expects this to work is unclear.

In a flashback to the memorable day when the Cow-orker told me her mother once had a tooth growing out her nose, the dentist has also been treated to an extended discussion of the Cow-orker's teeth, her family's teeth, and those of The Spouse and his whole family.

(It seems his family suffers from a hillbilly-like congenital defect that leads to broken, missing and discoloured teeth. Alternatively it could just be that they are hillbillies, and simply drink and smoke to excess and rot their teeth in their heads. Or maybe it's something to do with the aliens that have been hanging around their backyard.)

Eventually the phone call reaches its point. I think. It seems that the Cow-orker is less concerned with The Spawn's dental welfare than with establishing a plan of attack for when The Spawn realises Mummy & Daddy lied about the dentist not hurting. The plan she's aiming for is to have the dentist accept all the blame for the lies.

Cow-orker: suffer the children

"Ohmygod ohmygod! The Spawn got in trouble at school for the same thing she did last week! What's wrong with this misbegotten child?"

And she leaps onto the phone to ring around her family and mobilise them so they can all unite in condemnation of The Spawn and impress on her what an awful child she is for acting like a five-year-old rather than the child prodigy she's supposed to be. (Because there's nothing like a consolidated effort at scarring a child for life to encourage good behaviour).

[And in the middle of all this, the Secondary Cow-orker is telling me all about her latest mobile phone plan and why she chose it. My eardrums are under siege from all sides.]

Listening to the Cow-orker bewailing having given birth to the Antichrist, it becomes very clear that she's actually scared of the hyper-intelligent Spawn and is frightened of having to deal with a childish temper tantrum.

You just know The Spawn is going to grow up to be a serial killer.

Marketing strike again

"But this is terrible! All the prices we just mailed out to 7,000 new clients are wrong!"

"Why didn't you check the prices first?"

"Because this is what they were last year when we were buying them through a different supplier!"

The marketing manager then begins to panic and spin an elaborate story about how, in the past, the other supplier gave us a special price on these items at the start of each year, and maybe if the new supplier gives us the same special price that will help her cover up that she messed up majorly this time. Two problems with that, though: we didn't carry this stuff at all before last year, and the old supplier didn't do anything of the sort.

The marketing manager gibbers some more and tries to claim it's not her fault that she didn't check any of the information before she sent it out to people.

I think this may even be the first time I've actually seen someone think their way into a state of self-delusion aloud and in front of others... Even the Cow-orker tends to get by with making huge and painful leaps of Cow-orker logic inside her head.

The spirit of cooperation

I've made a partial escape from the Co-worker and am now splitting my time between my old department and working in a similar role at another department across town.

My bosses from the new department to a mailing list:

"Bootcamp poses licensing problems for all of us. Has anyone had constructive advice from Microsoft or resellers about how to approach this?"

My boss from my original department (the Crazy Man), replying to the mailing list:

"As you're probably aware JZ now works here. [Everyone: "Who?"] From his email & practical loading of 2 betas, he now possesses an iMac which can boot into 3 operating systems. VMWare costs much more than the software J's using, even after buying copies of Windows XP, so why would you bother with VMWare just get a Mac, load parallels & Bootcamp & away you go with whatever OS takes your fancy or more than one if you want. Why would you waste money on buying a PC :)"

New department bosses (scratching their heads), to me:

"WTF?"

Argh. She's been filing spam messages. I don't understand. I don't want to understand.

Cow-orker: the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy ... or something

My ex-manager was trying to get an answer (or even a grunt of acknowledgement) from a couple of workmates who are angling for a severance package. After an increasingly exasperating conversation, she gets a response ("Yes we've seen it, no we haven't responded to it") and exits in frustration.

The disgruntled aspiring retirees (both with a long history of shouting at people until they get what they want) begin complaining loudly about having been harassed, humiliated and bullied. The Cow-orker steps in to set the story straight and put them in their place.

Later that day the Cow-orker visits our ex-manager to let her know how things went. "And then I stood up for you and told them that you weren't bullying them, you were being condescending and patronising. Why are you looking at me like that?"

The Cow-orker then runs away to the Crazy Man to complain about our ex-manager's ingratitude. And now she's complaining to me about how our ex-manager is behaving unreasonably by being upset just because she went and threw petrol onto the bonfire of disgruntlement.

Cow-orker: delayed response

Yesterday

Cow-orker: "I don't understand what you did with this in 2004. Do you remember?"
Me: "No, that was two years ago. But I kept the relevant e-mails in the central file."

Today

Cow-orker: "This thing I asked you about yesterday... I don't understand what you did with this in 2004. Did you keep any e-mails?"

With friends like, er, me...

Have persuaded a friend to apply for the Token Human's job (that was formerly the Cow-orker's job before she came back and took my job - if the organisational incest continues at this rate we should see our first crop of cubicle hillbillies any week now).

Anyway. I felt vaguely guilty about encouraging him to put in an application, so I sent him the URL for the old site. This didn't deter him.

Maybe he thinks I was exaggerating.

Muah hah hah...

Cow-orker: Actually slightly worrying

My god. The Spawn is home sick, left in the care of The Spouse. But The Spouse was asleep when the Cow-orker left this morning, and is still asleep now. I know this because the five-year-old Spawn keeps calling its mother to let her know what it's doing, and that Daddy is still sleeping. The Spawn has tried to wake The Spouse up, but keeps getting told to go away and let him sleep.

If the Cow-orker seems concerned that her Spawn is effectively at home alone and unsupervised, she's hiding it remarkably well.

---

Later:
That's a relief (in more ways than one) - she's left early so she can go home to The Spawn.

Cow-orker: taking the Manson Defense

"I'm going to have to ring this client and stir them," says the person who gets mortally offended when clients get unhappy with her, "It's in my nature."

I'm pretty sure serial killers use that defense, too.

Cow-orker: To Boldly Go...

This is a strange and unique experience in pain. The Cow-orker is away for the next couple of days and I'm using the opportunity to tidy up the work instruction documentation for this section.

I'm now charting the dangerous waters of a 70-page document, around of half of which was originally written by me, and all of which has since been subject to extensive Cow-orker updating and reformatting.

God, this is making my head hurt so much. Not just the pidgin English, but the fact that just inserting a line break between paragraphs can cause half the document to spontaneously reformat itself. Clearly her gift for database design extends to word-processing...

Cow-orker: Let Sleeping Wildebeest Lie

It's strangely quiet. Then a strange snuffling, grunting sound breaks the silence - the Cow-orker has fallen asleep at her desk.

Hah! One mighty snort and she frightens herself awake, looking around frantically to see if anyone noticed!

Hahahahaha...

Presumably she's crashing here from too many sleepless nights at home, waiting for The Spouse to come inside from videotaping the alien flyovers and trying to record her while she's asleep.

I can now back him up on one thing, however - she does snore.

Cow-orker: The Truth Is Out There

The Cow-orker was woken again by The Spouse in the small hours of the morning with more video camera antics. This time he was out in the back yard screaming wildly about becoming a millionaire.

Because, you see, he'd just spent the last hour filming UFOs.

And he'd drunk half a carton of beer, which presumably went some way to explaining why the Cow-orker wasn't quite able to share his vision of translating footage of strange lights in the sky near a military airbase into instant wealth.

Yee-hah.

Cow-orker: miscellany

"Oh, I didn't tell you about this, did I?"

"Actually you did."

"Oh. Well, I'm going to tell you all about it all over again."

(What she's telling me is the reason behind her decision to switch the brand of recordable CDs she's been using).

No, strangely, I'm not making any progress on this, because some retard keeps interrupting me to talk about everything else that crosses their mind.

"I just sent an email to W***** to set up a meeting. I also asked him blah blah blah..."

Gah! I know you sent him an email, because you cc'ed me. You don't need to read the whole thing aloud to me again!

Cow-orker: plotting & scheming?

Joy. I've just had the fallout from another bout of "moral obligation" hysteria fall in my lap.

I think she's also finally gotten wind of the restructure I proposed for her area and is trying to get rid of me now. She found a position going at another department 100 miles inland and up in mountains and thinks I should apply for it:

"Not sure how you'd get there tho since its at ********* :) but mooving wouldn't be as much of an issue."

Note the mooving, by the way.

Because we're special...

An anouncement from the office of the second-highest ranking official across our entire organisation:

[Our Dept.] ARCHIEVES COMPLAINCE WITH HEWRRs FOR 2006.

It gets better. When I pointed it out to the Cow-orker and said how special it made me feel, she replied with:

Did you know that if you take and AWA now that [the Dept.] could decide that when it expries they can't afford to renegotiate with you and you revert back to Little Johnnie's so called safety net of 5 minimum conditions for employment?

While I'm having some trouble making sense of this, I'm reasonably sure she missed my point entirely.

Cow-orker: please vote me off the island

Impending renovations and staffing shortages have seen me moved back to Cow-orker Land, complete with real-live Cow-orker and Perpetual Jabbering Action.

I haven't had to work in close proximity to her since late 2004. God, I'd forgotten how loud she was. I've only been dealing with her when she's been worked up or stressed about something. Rediscovering just how much background noise she generates has been an education, and I think I've already gone deaf in my left ear after only three hours' exposure to the background Cow-orker emanations.

Argh argh argh...

Cow-orker: Mathematics of fear

Recipe for terror = (Cow-orker + wireless headset) = (roaming wall of sound effect + incipient deafness).

Cow-orker: Resistance is useless!

My old manager is in damage control mode now, as the Cow-orker descended on one of our support sections and began invoking "moral obligation" and telling them it was essential they begin immediately supporting something which hasn't even been agreed to yet. This is her version of "Shock and Awe".

Her human target apparently responded with something less than blind enthusiasm and total submission to her will. The Cow-orker assumes that he's being deliberately unhelpful in not wanting to embrace a half-arsed solution to a problem that hasn't yet been defined.

"Well I don't see any reason why you can't do this!"

At this point, common sense might suggest to a normal individual that this is because she has no understanding of what the helpdesk actually does. In her case, however, common sense gets shouted down by Cow-orker Sense which dictates that because she once worked in the forerunner to this area for a few months sometime last century (until they couldn't take anymore, the wimps!) she knows exactly what they can or can't do now.

End result: an unhappy, morally indignant and still-fuming Cow-orker, and an aggreived support area wondering what they did to anger the gods this time and whether it's too late to start rolling out the razor wire.

Marketing the blame

There's just something deeply satisfying about giving bad news to Marketing people...

No, the Cow-orker isn't heading back there - if that was the case they'd probably treat it as good news, as this is a different branch of Marketing (we have multiple Marketing branches - pity us). Later on, maybe, they'd start to wonder why everything seemed to be a crisis.

For the last few days I've been getting to tell Marketing variations of "Sorry, we can't do anything about the fact you sent out 10,000 advertising brochures without checking any of the facts first. The suppliers don't see how it's their problem, either, and aren't willing to sell stuff to us stuff 15% below cost to get you out of trouble."

The situation is wholely and solely Marketing's fault, and all it would have taken to avoid was a simple "Are these costs still current?" query. Instead I've gotten to witness this wonderful series of fabrications, denials and casting of blame at suppliers as the Marketing manager engages in as much butt-covering as humanly possible before things hit the fan.

And just to make it even funnier, it's also emerged that because they didn't check any details with anyone, they're partly (okay, mostly) responsible for causing potentially hundreds of clients to commit inadvertent software piracy over the last year...

Cow-orker: when the lowest common denominator keeps moving.

"You need to clarify this some more, because if it confuses me it's going to confuse the clients. You know how stupid some of them are."

"Fair enough. How are you going at simplifying those multi-page pricelists full of meaingless supplier abbreviations, unnecessary information and confusing jargon that we keep getting queries about?"

"I don't think I need to do that. If our clients aren't smart enough to read what I'm giving them, then they shouldn't be ordering from us."

[Translation: "I don't understand it and I don't want to do it."]

Cow-orker: survival tips

A couple of times a day the Cow-orker passes my office on her way to drop some paperwork at Admin. On the way back she's taken to stopping in "for a chat". For "chat" read "interrogation" - her growing paranoia about what I might or might not be working on is eroding her already childlike capacity for dealing with things on a "need to know" basis.

Preliminary results indicate that, if I see her go past, it's actually more productive for me to slip out into the back alleyway and do nothing for ten minutes than it is to remain at my desk, get trapped, and try to continue working while she takes guesses at wthat I'm working on and tells me why it can't possibly work.

Cow-orker: Silly Season continues

Cow-orker: "We can't offer support for this for clients who want to use it from home!"

Me: "You've written it into the terms and conditions on our website that we can."

Cow-orker: "Gotta go!"

Marketing, a.k.a. Tourette's Syndrome

We receive a quote from a supplier. The Crazy Man and I are pleased because it matches what we expected to be paying rather than the higher amount our account manager at the supplier kept insisting was the real cost.

Unfortunately the supplier has cc'ed Marketing, who are the ones hanging out for the items in question. Before the Crazy Man or I have time to lock in the price by acknowleding and accepting the written quote, the Marketing manager replies to the supplier, cc'ing us and the account manager who gave us the verbal quote on the high prices to begin with.

Marketing: "Thanks for the cheaper price, but this is all very confusing. We were expecting to pay the dearer price that you've been telling us for the last few weeks we're supposed to pay. Can you please explain why we're not paying the higher cost? Because we've reworked our whole business plan around the higher price, and this means we'll have to change it now."

We're now waiting for the account manager to inform us that the cheaper price from their underling was an error, at which point the Marketing manager will start wailing (again) about having to pay the higher price.

This has helped me work out the difference between strategic marketing (where the Cow-orker was based while working under the Marketing Shrew) and random bone-headed marketing, which is what I'm trying to deal with at the moment.

One involves grand visions that are almost completely divorced from the capacity of anyone to deliver them, while the other is simply blurting out the first stupid thing that enters your mind.

Cow-orker: Reload, shoot other foot

"Why isn't it ready yet? I leaked information about it, and it's still not ready to go, and now they want to know when it will be ready!"

"Remember that thing you kicked up a big fuss about last week and insisted everyone needed to discuss before this could go live?"

"Yes..."

"Well, they're discussing it."

"But - noooooooo!!!"

Ah, I see - they weren't actually supposed to listen to her.

Cow-orker: Hobbies

The Cow-orker has developed a new hobby.

First she finds something that she's not responsible for. Then she finds the person most affected by that something without actually being responsible for managing it, either. Then she encourages them to tell her about problems they're having with it, without actually telling them that she's not the person who'll be dealing with it anyway.

At this point, having successfully identified a random problem, she throws the panic switch. Things then go one of two ways.

OPTION 1

She sits on the issue for two to three days to build up a good panic-driven head of steam while the information she's gleaned from her unsuspecting source gradually becomes obsolete. Then she rings her source back and panics them more by telling them how much more critical their situation has become because of the two or three days that have elapsed. It doesn't matter if she tells them exactly what they told her in the first place; the Cow-orker is a master at inflating something into a full-blown crisis and has been known to send people running in circles like headless chickens just through the sheer weight of conviction she can bring to her claims that they're doomed. Plus, of course, they're under the impression that she's actually been looking into their concerns since she last spoke to them.

Then she rings me and tells me she's just spoken to whoever, and they're really stressing out about whatever the issue is, because they're in an awful situation, they're doomed, and they don't know what to do. At this point it's customary for me to act surprised and explain to her that I've actually been speaking to these people before and since she first pumped them for information, that they're aware the situation is either under control or on its way to being resolved, and that her victims should know there's nothing new to worry about.

Her customary response? "Well they're in a blind panic at the moment for some reason, so someone really needs to speak to them to sort things out. Would you like me to do it?"

Are bears Catholic?

OPTION 2

Rather than stew on the issue, she begins contacting everyone she can think of (senior management, middle management, operational supervisors) and rants desperately about the great crisis of our times and how we're morally obliged to act now now now and implement some half-arsed solution she's made up on the spot and which has the twin benefits of being completely unworkable and not having been run past the people who would actually need to implement it.

Not that it matters what they might have to say, however. The Cow-orker has decided that there's a moral obligation at stake, and that the only solution is to make it someone else's problem immediately whether or not they're equipped to handle it in the first place. Following this, she'll ring me and rave down the phone, approaching borderline hysteria when I won't agree to begin trying to implement her plan, and ramping up the volume in the belief it will make her case more persuasive.

"But they have to do it! We have a moral obligation!" (Which I'm assuming is either her new buzzword, or means that, having convinced someone else that the sky is about to fall, she's then promised she'll take care of things for them without checking first to see whether she actually can).

This is followed by my token effort to convince her that implementing a poorly though-out knee-jerk solution without consulting any of the people expected to deliver it, which has no resources to support it, and which we can be reasonably confident will fail, is likely to upset clients far more than simply explaining to them that we're working on a solution to what's actually a non-critical problem of her own invention.

This option usually ends in dire warnings of imminent catastrophe, the necessity of calling back an equally frantic client or workmate immediately (because they've somehow gotten it into their head that the end is nigh and "are in a blind panic"), and further exhortations to do something immediately even if it doesn't even give the illusion of being remotely useful.

Cow-orker: Welcome to the Twilight Zone

The Cow-orker just paid a visit, so I've been treated to a glimpse inside Chez Cow-orker.

The Spouse got somewhat hammered last night. The Cow-orker woke up at 1.30 this morning to find him swaying at the end of the bed, clutching a video camera. When asked what the hell he was doing, his response was that now he was finally going to prove she snored.

The Cow-orker tells him he's an idiot and, morevoer, that he's creeping her out with his video camera antics and is never to do anything like that again. The Spouse objects to being described as creepy, and decides to teach her a lesson by sleeping on the couch. The old, backbreaker couch, that is, with no suspension or upholstery. Yeah, that'll teach her. He grabs a blanket and a pillow and retires to the moral highground where videotaping unsuspecting sleeping women isn't considered the province of serial killers and stalkers.

An hour later the Cow-orker is woken by a crash. The Spouse, having successfully half-crippled himself on the couch, has tried to return to bed but tripped over the blanket in mid-lurch and collapsed in an incoherent heap on the floor. Eventually he makes it to bed.

An hour after that, the Cow-orker is woken again. This time, he's out on the front porch, urinating off into the darkness. His explanation this time is that it was closer than the toilet, which is at the other end of the house. She returns inside, grateful that it's still only 3.30am and that they have a high fence along the front of their yard. It's not until much later that she realises how lucky she was that he was able to negotiate the front door in the first place.

Just another night in the suburbs, really...

Rumour and Expectation

Day One:
My contract is renewed for another two months.

Day Two:
The Token Human who replaced the Cow-orker when she left for Marketing hands in his notice. Cat + Pigeons has nothing on what this results in,,,

Day Three:
Word spreads. The feeding frenzy begins.

• the Crazy Man approaches me to see if I want the job. He doesn't seem too surprised when I say "no", and we briefly discuss whether now is the time to look at restructuring that unit;
  
  
• the Cow-orker approaches to see if I want to take the job. She's still struggling with the idea that I might not want to come back. I tell her "no", and she asks whether the Crazy Man has sounded me out about taking the job;
  
  
• my former manager phones me to warn that I'm likely to be set upon by the Secondary Cow-orker to see if I've been head-hunted (or press-ganged) yet. The Secondary Cow-orker interrogated the token human at length the previous evening to make him spill the beans about what was going to happen with his job, and appears to be trying to piece together the order in which he told people. Apparently this has something to do with her theory of people nominating their successor;
  
  
• a former workmate rings up to see if I've been approached to take the job. He only thinks it's funny now because the Primary and Secondary Cow-orkers haven't yet seen fit to confide in him;
  
  
• the Secondary Cow-orker finally strikes. Have I been approached yet? What do I intend to do? What do I think "they" are planning?
  (She could simply ask management what they plan to do, but that might pose unacceptable limits on the wildness of her speculations. Plus she's probably convinced they'd lie to her, anyway, so she may as well begin asking everyone.else who doesn't know what's happening so they can fuel her imagination);
  
  
• another former workmate warns me that the Secondary Cow-orker is now quietly going nuts trying to predict what will happen, and inventing scenarios in which she'll be able to win the job that's rightfully hers after being "cheated" of it twice already;
  
  
• my former section head approaches my former manager to see if I plan to move back into my old area, and whether anyone's approached me about doing so yet. He seems surprised to learn that I'm not leaping with joy at the prospect of returning to work with the Cow-orker.
  (Incidentally, this confirms my suspicions that people didn't believe me last year when I said that I wasn't just leaving because of the money);
  
  
• the Secondary Cow-orker drops by for another visit to tell me her theories on why the token human is leaving. To the best of my knowledge they all miss the mark by a wide margin. Then she tells me how she'd have been a much better choice for the job in the first place, because after one rough year in the role, he still didn't have the breadth of knowledge that I (or even the Cow-orker) had built up over several years;
  


• more warnings: the Seconday Cow-orker's mood swings have gotten dramatically worse when some sadist pointed out that I have a family to support and might not have a choice about whether I take the job or not;
  
  
• the Cow-orker comes back to see whether I've reconsidered my previous response, and to fish for hints as to whether I've heard anything about what's going to happen. She's busy working herself into a state of terror over the thought of being to look after things alone, even though there's actually zero possibility of that;
  
  
• my manager calls again to tell me that the Secondary Cow-orker is behaving like a lunatic, but he hasn't been able to find out what she's been told that set her off.
  

A productive day for everyone involved, really.

Never work with children or Cow-orkers

Argh. They're trying to set up a secure download site for distributing software here, and one of the things I've been asked to do is test it out before it goes live. Apparently the Cow-orker is too busy to test the links to see if anything downloads, so it falls to me.

I click a link. A file downloads. There is rejoicing in the streets that this complex and delicate task has been completed.

Then a nagging voice of doubt makes me decide to check the files that have actually downloaded. One of the packages consistes of only two files, neither of which appear to be executable. I email the Cow-orker to ask if this is correct, seeing as she supposedly has the master copies of the software from which the downloadable files were compiled, and should be able to tell me.

An email comes back. "I don't know. In fact I don't even know if I used the right files or the right software in the first place, and I'm not going to check for you now. Maybe you should download a few gigabytes of data from the software vendor themselves and compare it directly. But you'll need to contact them for a username and password. And I'd like us to go live with this tomorrow. Do you think that's possible?"

I'm starting to suspect there's an ulterior motive in asking me to do this: it's punishment for trying to leave. Although my contract expires again in a week, so if they don't get a move on at sorting that out their plans to make me suffer may well fall through...

Power struggles

The Crazy Man doesn't like being made to do any work or produce results. On the other hand he doesn't like it when people don't follow rules, and will usually pursue rule-breaking to the exclusion of all else. Another manager doesn't like following any rules except his own and is something of a control freak. They clash, because neither has the capacity to actually approach the point of contention with anything less than a demand for the other side's complete and unconditional surrender, and promise never to do anything again.

The Crazy Man continues trying (with some justification) to insert himself into some of the other manager's business processes. The other manager tries to retaliate by appropriating all the Crazy Man's related processes, but fails because it's hard for the head of Technical Support to claim with any justification that he should also control Purchasing. The Crazy Man wins and, being the Crazy Man, gloats.

The other manager strikes back by forcibly migrating the Crazy Man and all his staff from their mixture of Eudora, Netscape Mail and other random mail clients to Outlook/Exchange. Most of his admin stuff are just unhappy because it's something new and they don't deal well with "new"; others are unhappy because they're convinced that without their carefully-ordered, decade-old Eudora mailboxes they'll never be able to find any mail ever again. Great anguish ensues.

Moral: nobody wins a war.

Cow-orker: "It can't possibly work, and I'm already doing it anyway."

I was sent a link to some information about the Noguchi filing system, which I thought looked like something we could use at work as an alternative to chaos and exploding files. I pass it on to the Cow-orker and her workmate, the token human.

"I'm already doing exactly this with my manila folder collection on my desk," she responds. To which she could have added "Except they're in no discernible order and I don't tell anyone that they're there."

(Her manila folder collection is a fearsome sight - two magazine holders stuffed full of folders containing randomly assorted collections of paperwork, some of it dating back two or three years. Only she knows what she has in there, or why).

Then she realises that the Noguchi system means that there needs to be some kind of consistency, discipline and cooperation with others underpinning the whole thing (which, obviously, is what makes it a system rather than simply a random collection of manila folders kept on someone's desk because it's more convenient than putting them away) and clearly that can't be tolerated.

"It won't work for us," she says, and begins grasping at straws as to why the existing "system" can't be tampered with. None of the arguments are particularly convincing, and most don't seem to be based on anything that Noguchi actually proposes.

And then she concludes with what she considers the knockout blow: "If we all got hit by a bus and someone new had to take over, how would they find anything?"

"The same way they'd find anything in your manila folders, I expect. Except, you know, this system would be documented so that people would know how it worked."

She flounders for a moment, and then decides to pre-emptively blame the Token Human for the inevitable failure of the Noguchi system if it was ever introduced here. "He'd never be able to stick to it," says Miss Keep-stuffing-the-files-until-they-explode who, ten years on, is still struggling with the concept that filing stuff electronically doesn't begin and end with dumping randomly-named files into a single directory.

Cow-orker: Outsourcing

"Someone sent me this e-mail. Can you read it for me?"

Cow-orker: Told you so

The Cow-orker rang me last week to tell me that she was about to repeat a task I did a year ago (organising approval for a demo CD containing free and evaluation versions of software), and to see what advice I could give her about how to proceed.

What she obviously wanted me to tell her was that she didn't have to do anything and could just give blanket approval for everything. What I told her was that she'd need to check to make sure none of the conditions had changed.

"Okay, so for this one I just need to ring the people we buy it from locally?"

"No, you'll have to contact the overseas publishers of that software and see what their distribution terms are."

"But I don't want to do that. The deadline is really tight, and I'd rather talk to someone I like who works for a third party that isn't allowed to make that kind of decision. I know I asked for your advice, but because I don't like what I'm hearing, I'll ignore it and do my own thing."

(It's funny - any other time you have to beat her with a stick to stop her talking to strangers, but as soon as she has to actually find out some information from them (and especially if it involves putting something in writing) she'll move heaven and earth to avoid having to do so. But I'm only passing through - so I keep telling myself - and it's no skin off my nose if she wants to bugger around).

"Suit yourself," I tell her.

That was a week ago, and a reply just came through from someone she likes who works for a third party that isn't allowed to make that kind of decision. They tell her almost exactly that, and then suggest she does what I told her a week ago.

That distant huffing sound you hear is the Cow-orker hyper-ventilating because this means she's just lost a week from the very tight deadline.

Cow-orker: Careless Talk II

Talking to the Crazy Man. I mention that we might soon be accessing our primary database through a different system (one that has an unenviable reputation for being a little less than reliable). He seems surprised. The Cow-orker was e-mailing me back at Death Spiral to complain about it, so I figured he must have heard about it. Apparently not.

I fill him in. According to the Cow-orker, our database has to be migrated to another system and we're to be given no choice about it because two other section heads have said so. Quite what these two have to do with it isn't actually clear, though, and the Crazy Man wonders how they got involved. The poor man. He really doesn't seem to know.

"The Cow-orker told them we were doing some development work on the database."

"Why would she do that? It's got nothing to do with them!"

I shrug helplessly.

He clutches his head in the traditional gesture of pain*. "God, I'm going to have to talk to her about this, aren't I?"

*(Clutching of the head is a gesture my former manager used to perform a lot when trying to understand the Cow-orker's motives. The Crazy Man has developed the same tendency independently after managing the Cow-orker for the last six months. At first I thought it was some kind of ritual gesture used by managers to ward off evil spirits, but it's hard to see how a ritual could survive in the face of such obvious and consistent failure. Now I figure it's just a reflex action, because curling into a fetal position is too socially awkward).

Cow-orker: Careless Talk I

The Cow-orker's been asking me if I'd consider applying for the position of token human if her current colleague gets a job elsewhere. She's had trouble accepting that I might not leap at the opportunity, and I've been trying to explain that I'd have to think long and hard (and be a lot closer to poverty than I currently am) before I'd come back to deal with exactly the same stuff I've already walked away from once this year. She struggles with the concept.

I could have simplified things by telling her that I couldn't face dealing with her on a daily (hourly!) basis again, but I need to work with her intermittently over the next few weeks and there's no point making things harder for myself.

Besides, she'd probably think I was joking.

Jump to this morning. The phone rings. For a change it's not the Cow-orker. Instead it's my ex-manager. We chat briefly, and then:

"What have you been telling the Cow-orker, by the way?"

"As little as possible, really. Why?"

"Because she's been telling people you're not interested in working anywhere in this division ever again."

Communication Problems

Life under the Crazy Man:

"This person wants a copy of these documents. If I mail them through to you, can you mail them through to her?"

I'm sure I can, but what's the point? It's not like he's actually saving himself any work here. In fact, given that he's been incapable of getting my e-mail address right for the last three days* and has to resend the documents twice, he's actually making extra work for himself.

* Discussion of e-mail addresses went something like this:

"Use this address. That one doesn't work."

"But it should, so I'll use it."

"It should, but it doesn't. Use this one instead."

"I'll use the one that should work."

[pause]

"Have you got it yet?"

"No. Did you send it to the address that works?"

"I sent it to the address that should work. Oh, wait, I've just gotten an 'undeliverable' message from the mail server."

"That would be because that address doesn't work."

"But it should..."

Repeat ad infinitum.

So now his mail software has the wrong address tucked away in its auto-complete list, and he keeps choosing it instead of the correct address, and wondering why a) I don't get his e-mails, and b) why he keeps getting 'undeliverable' messages.

Cow-orker: Green Thumb ... of Death!

The Cow-orker's pot plant looks even worse. Half of the remains had to be cut away because it had been nuked so thoroughly that some parts that hadn't been charred were starting to rot, some of the green stems fell off when my old manager touched them to see whether they felt as much like perished rubber as they looked, and the final two leaves are hanging at a thirty degree angle with the only parts that aren't slowly curling up being the bits that were turned into pure carbon by the Cow-orker's chemical warfare attack.

She remains optimistic, however, that the half-dozen green stems ending in cauterised stumps will shoot forth new leaves. Any day now...

Once more unto the breach

And after only a few days away, I've been asked back to my old work yet again - this time for up to several weeks. This time around things may not be quite as much fun: the Cow-orker won't be away on holiday, I'll be working directly under the Crazy Man, and I'll be working in the basement of the building, referred to by all and sundry as The Dungeon due to the concrete walls (painted, at least), near-total lack of natural light, and sepulchral atmosphere.

The things I do to earn a living...

Loving the smell of napalm in the morning.

The Cow-orker's pot-plant isn't getting any better. My (former) manager prodded a couple of the stalks to see if they were as rubbery as they were starting to look.

They fell off.

Random Acts of Cruelty

The Crazy Man has been giving his staff their annual performance reviews (or at least has been reviewing those staff he can't palm off on somebody else). Then it comes time to review an individual that has occasionally filled the role of Backup Cow-orker. The BCO is a very earnest, easily-stressed individual who always seems to be operating several feet out of his depth.

Crazy Man: "Your communication skills need some work. You have a problem with oral communication."

BCO : "What kind of a problem?"

Crazy Man: "I'm not going to tell you, because then you might guess who told me you had a problem."

BCO: "So what can I do?"

Crazy Man: "I think you should talk to people and ask them what your problem is."

And that's the Crazy Man's serious and considered opinion. The BCO is now wandering the corridors of the building looking lost, bewildered, and afraid to talk to people because he's been told he has an unspecified oral communication problem.

Cow-orker: "I woz 'ere."

Ah, dear. Some database testing takes me into the guts of the long-suffering system we use here, and the Cow-orker's not-so-delicate hoof-prints are all over the place.

One-trick functions have been added and given pride of place in the interface, when a moment's thought would have made them actually useful and versatile ... reference data added with random spelling and punctuation ... inconsistent reference data added, so that the organising principle of the database (organisational units name) is replaced by the popular name for an area that doesn't actually match what it is or where it fits within the organisation ... duplication of reference data because she hasn't checked to see whether something's already there.

She's the Godzilla of databases, honestly.

On the bright side she hasn't changed the colour scheme, so I'm no imminent danger of seared retinas or colour-induced brain siezures. Or maybe I just haven't tested the right report yet ...

Slappable Clients: The Return

"Hi, I'd just like to check up on the status of an order."

"Sure. Do you have the requisition number handy?"

"Um... No."

"That's okay. Do you know who it was ordered for?"

"Ummm ... No."

"Oh."

"How about I find out some details and call you back?"

Give the man a cigar.

Cow-orker: Scorched Earth Special

Hmm. Doesn't look too bad from back here. If you don't count the lack of foliage, that is...


Looking a little the worse for wear up close, though. And aren't plants supposed to be green, not black?


Scorched Earth goodness.


Sadly there are no "before" shots to show just how little of this plant survived the chemical bombing.

Cow-orker: In the absence of light...

... the Cow-orker, rather than darkness, prevails. Or so it seems.

The dreaded Forms directory (Enter the Cow-orker, 21/7/2004), where all useful information goes to languish in obscurity when the Cow-orker has anything to do with it, has bloated in my absence. The Cow-orker's request to purchase a gel-filled wrist-rest for her keyboard sits alongside quotes and business cases worth tens of thousands of dollars, because it's easier to dump everything into one location than sort and file it where it belongs and might be of use.

She also still seems to be struggling with the idea of turning on junk-mail filters. Her Inbox just from the last few days is filled with spam, a goodly proportion of it addressed to The Spouse. Maybe she's saving it for him to read, or she's worried that she'll miss out on that one magic e-mail that turns out not to be a con?

And someone appears to have been filing work-emails in the Junk Mail folder rather than simply deleting them outright if they're not needed, or putting them someplace sensible. I don't even think that some of these have been acted on. I don't know whether the Primary or Secondary Cow-orker is the likeliest suspect in this instance, though.

Coincidentally (not!) one of the filing cabinets appears to have suffered a hernia from being crammed full of paper.

Cow-orker: the magic begins again

Haven't got a login to any PCs or the network yet, but that's okay - the Cow-orker didn't change her username or password in all the years I worked with her, and there's no reason to assume she's done so now, and ....

... I'm in!

[Full screen desktop wallpaper depicting The Spawn in all its naked glory]

I'm out!

(Fortunately she hasn't changed the username or password for the generic login, either, nor has she customised the desktop this time around).

---

The Cow-orker had a thing for pot plants in the office, and whenever one was moved to a new area or out of her direct sight she'd loom over the people nearest it and lecture them on how to take care of it. She'd follow this up with periodic checks to see how her fellow members of the vegetable kingdom were going, lecturing people again if they'd been remiss.

Then she went upstairs to Marketing and left behind the only remaining pot plant she'd still been able to consider hers (because the Marketing Shrew wouldn't let her have enough real estate to fit it in). When her replacement came on board she lectured him and made him promise to water it regularly and take care of it. He kind of did, and despite one or two brown leaves and the occasional bout of wilting when it went a fortnight without water, the plant survived her absence.

(I'd suspect the Cow-orker of slipping down sometimes when no-one was around and watering it, but it's out of character for her to do something inconspicuously).

Then I went away, she came back and so on.

Last week she decided the plant wasn't looking as good as it could have. Thankfully she didn't try talking to it, but she did decide that giving it some fertiliser was a good idea. And perhaps it even was.

What wasn't a good idea was just flinging handfuls of fertiliser powder straight onto the plant so that the powder coated its leaves and stems, and then just leaving it.

It looks like someone's napalmed it. There are only two leaves left, both of which are more brownish-black than green. They were the lucky ones. The rest simply burned black and died, before the poor plant was rushed outside and washed down to remove the rest of the powder before it withered the whole plant. The dead and blackened leaves were trimmed off by the Cow-orker's human workmate, and now the once-healthy pot plant consists of two half-burned leaves and a little over half-a-dozen green, decapitated stalks.

The Cow-orker: Agent Orange for the 21st Century.

Back to the house of pain

The phone rings. It's my manager from my old, pre-Death Spiral job. The Cow-orker is going on annual leave for a couple of weeks. How do I feel about filling in while she's gone?

(Presumably not as a cow-orker, but I'm willing to get liquored-up at the start of the day and lurch mindlessly and incoherently through the day if that's what they want.)

I take a couple of minutes to think it over. I'll get paid casual rates, the Cow-orker won't be there (but I'll bet she either makes a special visit, or rings every second day to see what's happening), and I'll only have to deal with the Crazy Man and the Secondary Cow-orker ... how bad can it be?

We shall see. I start on Monday.

Housekeeping

No, that's not what I'm doing with myself at the moment. Well, not entirely.

New posts
There are odds and ends of things (mostly from Project Death Spiral) that for various reasons I didn't get around to posting here. As I retrieve these from old e-mails or wake up screaming in the night when hidden memories bubble to the surface I'll put them here.

Spam
The spam's getting annoying. I could turn on Blogger's 'word verification' feature to (hopefully) counter a lot of the automatic spam Blunt Trauma seems to attract, but it looks like it will be a pain for people wanting to leave legitimate comments (I'd find it annoying if I had to go through it, anyway). If you're not sure what word verification is, have a look here. If you really don't want to go through this step to leave a comment, let me know and I won't enable it.
Otherwise, if no-one cares one way or the other, or I get no answers at all (or if the answers I do get are all spam) then I'll switch this on and save myself the trouble of going in and deleting spam comments.

What am I doing now?
Not a great deal. Fortunately when I left my last job, I had a large enough payout for my unused annual leave (or, as I prefer to think of it, my consolation prize for taking part in Survivor: Cow-orker) that finding work immediately isn't something I need to worry about for a little while yet. So I can take my time looking at what's around, see what I'm interested in (somehow get through the selection process!) ... and probably still end up working for madmen alongside a collection of sociopaths and lunatics.

Death Spiral Retrospective: undefined

PMv1 has returned to take over Death Spiral following the departure of Sluggo, and is having a meeting with me and my minion. To try and cut corners (or as he prefers to think of it, get Death Spiral back to his original vision and still meet an arbitrary deadline he's come up with) he's hit upon a solution that's been available from the start but has consistently been left alone by everyone (himself included) because the results would tell us nothing about what we really need to know, would probably panic management into going for a needlessly expensive and unnecessary quick-fix solution, and would only lead to us having to do everything over again properly if (when!) Death Spiral finally gets the software it needs to proceed.

"Moreover," we point out, foolishly expecting this to be the clincher, "the results wouldn't even be accurate."

"Define 'accurate'."

Oh. That's not good. "Useful. Not wrong. Something on which we could base informed decisions and make valid recommendations."

"Define 'valid'."

Things deteriorate from there, but by the end of the meeting it seems that the official Project Death Spiral line is that project staff asking for accuracy just aren't seeing the big picture, and what would the people who need to use the Death Spiral on an ongoing basis know anyway?

Project Death Spiral: the beatings will continue until morale improves

Events seem to have conspired to keep my minion from jumping ship to Brother of Death Spiral (while still giving her a good chunk of BoDS workload) and, to mark the occasion, PMv1 seems to have decided that he'll drive her off anyway by not reading anything she sends him, not reading any project documentation that he hasn't written (because if it's not part of his project plan, then by definition its worthless - and if it repeats what he's already said, it's redundant. I'm surprised he's not running around burning down libraries, really), and then blaming her for not giving clear answers to questions he's incapable of asking because he won't read anything and refuses to come down to The Shed to look at any of the work that's being done (when challenged to do so, his response was "It's not my job to come down to The Shed.").

"Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice." Funny, though - I didn't think Yoda was talking about Project Managers.

Clearly Science needs to identify the genes that predispose people to project management and delete them from the gene pool.

I think this came as a timely reminder as to why this is my last day here.

Hmm, maybe in my next job.

There are times one of these would have been useful.

Project Death Spiral: Mr "Eight Productive Hours"

Another scheduled meeting with PMv1, and this time I enter the Project Office just as he's leaving.

"Oh," he says, "I forgot about your meeting. I was just on my way to another one."

The bugger. He wanted these regular meetings, and they're in his calendar, but he's trying to slip off to another meeting after already keeping me waiting yesterday?

We go inside the project office and whip through my report ("It's all going well"). Personally I wouldn't trust any report from someone on their second-last day who's leaving because they couldn't stand dealing with the project office anymore, but he seems happy enough.

I leave and drop into the refectory on the way to grab a late breakfast to eat at my desk. On my way out, I nearly collide with PMv1 hurrying in to collect his breakfast (his "other meeting", presumably), meaning he was planning to do the same thing today that he did yesterday - ignore his calendar, don't use the Great Whiteboard to note where he's going, and keep people waiting for meetings that he's requested.

Back in The Shed, I mention this to the rest of the Death Spiral team while scrubbing my details off our mini whiteboard (Project Office staff never come down to the sheds if they can help it, but none of use are willing to gamble that they wouldn't do so for the sole purpose of a whiteboard spot-check). The remaining original temp confirms that he used to do exactly the same thing to her all the time when she was team leader on Spawn of Death Spiral, scheduling regular status-update meetings and then turning up late with his breakfast in hand.

The Project Office: inspiring the maximum amount of cynicism with the minimum amount of effort.

Project Death Spiral: the handover progress status update report

I have a scheduled meeting with PMv1 to deliver the "one-on-one handover progress status update report". And yes, it does indeed take longer to say it than it does to deliver it.

As part of keeping him updated on progress of the handover to my minion (whose defection to Brother of Death Spiral is still on the cards, so this handover process has the potential to be the procedure that just keeps on, uh, proceding). He's missing from the project office when I arrive, so I consult the Great Whiteboard for advice.

Nothing.

I'm not entirely surprised that the Rule of Whiteboard doesn't apply to him, but the temptation to write "AWOL" next to his name is nearly overwhelming, even before our business analyst looks over his cubicle wall and begins urging "Do it! Do it! What have you got to lose?"

When PMv1 arrives (clutching a slightly greasy-looking bag from the refectory), the actual meeting itself lasts less time than it took me to walk to his office, and only a fraction of the time I've spent hanging around waiting for him to turn up. All part of the "eight productive hours a day" that PMv1 urged us all to work towards under his benevolent dictatorship.

Project Death Spiral: counting the silverware

Phone rings.

PMv1: "Did Sluggo leave his Project Office laptop down there?"

[check around The Shed]

Me: "No."

PMv1: "How about an empty laptop case?"

[quick check with other Shed occupants]

Me: "No. We didn't know until now he even had a laptop."

PMv1: "Hrrmmpph!"

Scapegoat Factor rising...