It's like blood sports in a cubicle

Round One

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

"Which questions were those?"

"The ones about the statuses?"

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

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

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

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

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

Round Two

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

"Because I don't know."

"To HR. They'll be - "

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

"..."

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

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

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

"You just call the general number and - "

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

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

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

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

"But it has statuses."

"But it's not the same system."

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

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

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

"They won't - "

"Because I need to know, you know."

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

Round Three

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

"Yes."

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

"Yes!"

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

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

"HR have a general - "

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

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

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

Endgame

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

---

* Lies!

^ Damned lies!

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

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

Low entry standards

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

Why are you surprised?

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

What's in a name?

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

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

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

There must just be something about their name.

Not technically-minded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still not dead.

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

The upcoming backflips are sure to be entertaining.

---

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

The *other* kind of proactive.

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

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

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

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

"I just get inquisitive," Ted claims.

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

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

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

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

Magic reporting.

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

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

Me: [coughing fit]

Invertebrate: "So where does it come from?"

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

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

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

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

"We fixed them."

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

Paraphrasing, of course.

---

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

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

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

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

Desperate for attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Incompatible minds

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

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

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

- pause - 

"He WHAT???"

The forty percent solution.

We've been having a lot of trouble lately with a particular vendor: their account rep won't return our calls, they sat on a $200,000 order for a week because they were confused by something that could have been cleared up if they'd actually bothered to ask us, and now we're still struggling to get their damn software to work because they have a licensing system so stupidly cryptic you could be excused for suspecting the involvement of some covert, quasi-military intelligence agency and they still can't give us the right codes to make things work.

So there's a fair bit of ill-feeling towards this company at the moment. In fact nearly everyone who has to deal with them and their product (except the Amazing Toad Man, who wants to lock us into a three-year contract with them, but he lives in a parallel world to the rest of us) would gladly be rid of them both and are starting to explore alternatives.

And then Gimli comes stumping through, fresh from a presentaion by this vendor and their "partner" (a certain hardware vendor who also like to dabble in software sales and invariably messes it up), all fired up on how we should buy yet more stuff from them.

And why?

Because their hardware-selling "partner" owns forty percent of them. 

Why is this a good thing?

They own forty percent!

Will the stuff Gimli thinks we should buy actually do what we want it to do? Do we even need it?

Forty percent, mate! Forty. Per. Cent!

And that's what the argument boils down to. We should buy more stuff from a loathed and unreliable supplier because they're part-owned by another supplier that provides average service on its core business products, and lacklustre service on the stuff Gimli thinks we should be interested in. To make it worse, we'd have to order the stuff we don't need from the vendor we can't stand through the partner; in effect, multiplying their inefficiencies and poor service.

Gimli only makes it out of the room without being stoned because it's late in the day, we're too tired to realise that trying to figure out any logic in this is completely futile ... and we're fresh out of stones.

Evolution: not for everyone.

The Stress Fiend updated our group email signature yesterday, replacing our aging plain text monstrosity that consumed half a page with a leaner, more legible, html version. This combined two of Ted E.'s great, pathological fears: change, and html files. We don't really know why he hates them so much, but he does. It has nothing to do with compatibility, standards, or readability. He just hates them with the kind of visceral loathing normal people reserves for someone hitting a bag of kittens with a hammer.

Ted wrote an email. The new signature came up. He ran straight to The Invertebrate to complain.

"Look what Someone's done!* This is something we should have discussed as a group, instead of just going ahead with it and not telling anyone!"

The Invertebrate: "Actually, I reckon that looks pretty good."

"No, they shouldn't be doing this at all! There's a standard format we're supposed to use, with block capitals and stuff."

"I've been here eleven years, and if there's a standard format, I've never seen anyone use it. And I can tell you no-one is using it now."

Ted changes tack: "It's making our email run slower."**

"Well, I'll tell you what. You open and close a few emails with the old signature and the new one, time how long it takes for them to open, and then we'll see if it's a problem."

So Ted goes off to dutifully open and close emails.

"See? Look how fast this one opens with the old signature! I told you!"

"Dude, you already had it open in the preview pane. That doesn't count."

Crestfallen, Ted returns to opening and closing emails (which sounds wasteful, but actually lifts the net productivity of the team by keeping him engaged in something useless and pointless). Finally he's forced to concede that new signature isn't grinding our email system to a halt, and we get to keep the new signature until he can come up with something else that's wrong with it.

---

* When it's a capital "s" Someone, he always means me. I think it's his idea of being subtle, but now everyone tends to snigger or roll their eyes when he says it. I don't think he's worked out why yet.

** We use Lotus Notes. It doesn't do "slower", only "paralysed with fear and indecision" and, if we're lucky "sudden death".

The General Pointlessness of Ted

Another fine Ted moment. He's been quite prolific lately. One might almost say incontinently so.

Now he's complaining about the fact that The Invertebrate and I often don't start until 9am. Somehow it escapes his highly-selective world view that just because he slinks away at 3 or 4pm(or earlier if people are mean to him and he gets a headache) doesn't mean everyone else packs up and goes home because they can't go on without him. The Invertebrate's hours are a little rubbery (one of the perks of a middle-management position), but I'm routinely here until 5 or later on most days.

On an unrelated note, we have an internal auditor lurking in our area at the moment, and there was a particularly telling moment yesterday after he'd finished grilling The Invertebrate and the Stress Fiend. Ted E. was lurking hopefully, waiting to be included so he could complain about something,  but at the end of the conversation all he got was a quizzical look from the auditor and the rather pointed question: "So what is it you actually do?"

Introducing The Amazing Toad Man

The Amazing Toad Man haunts the upper levels of middle management or, at least, seems to think he does. It's not actually clear from outside his area exactly where he sits on the corporate ladder, and it's entirely possible he sits no higher than The Invertebrate. But he doesn't let that hold him back, or keep him from trying to throw his weight around in other areas' operations. The Amazing Toad Man isn't the name I came up with. I think a friend with the misfortune to work under him came up with that title, or one very similar to it, and the name has stuck in my mind.

The first time I met him he was attempting to pick the lock on the toilet cubicle door while the cubicle was still occupied. I know this because I was the occupant.

"Oh," he said, looking surprised when I opened the door. He gestured at the lock with the bent paperclip he was holding. "It was locked."

Because apparently that somehow made it all perfectly normal.

That's more or less set the tone for my dealings with him ever since. In fact it turned out to be somewhat symbolic, as ever since then he's consistently tried to insert himself into other areas' business without ever thinking to ask ahead of time whether his input is relevant, required or desirable. His specialty is ignoring information and requests for input right up until a deadline occurs, then trying to throw a spanner in the works because he thinks he's been slighted somehow or had his requirements overlooked, and then sulking when the spanner gets thrown back at him because (a) there's no possible room in the deadline to accomodate his last-minute demands, and (b) when you're a minority stakeholder, you don't get to derail the entire process just because you didn't want to talk to anyone earlier when they asked you for input.

He's also presided over an impressive drop in his team's numbers, experience and morale. But it makes his salary budget look good, so in his mind it all balances out.

He's currently plotting and scheming behind our back to lock us into a three-year agreement with a lacklustre supplier everyone else would be happy to move away from. Again, the bulk of our organisation's business with this supplier is ours rather than his, but why let that get in the way of pretending he's the man to see? So expect the Amazing Toad Man to appear again in future when The Invertebrate returns and discovers what's going on.

Semantics: Crisis Mode

"Crisis" (normal person's definition):

matter in dire need of attention; something critical has/is going to fail / blow up / sterilise half the population*; bone^.

"Crisis" (abnormal person's definition. No need for names by this point, is there?):

hoping someone else would answer an email you could have handled three days ago, finally realising no-one has because they all knew you were capable of answering it and it fell into the category of things you're responsible for, and suddenly trying to escalate it as evidence of a major systems failure.

---

* Although there are times, most of them at work, when I have trouble considering this to necessarily be a bad thing.

 

^ Bone: "Bollocks, naff. Not. Very. Good." (Dog Soldiers)

Daring to subvert the paradigm

You're familiar with the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out?  It's not so much a principle here as a way of life, but you get the idea.

Ted E. has boldly gone where no man has gone before, reversed the polarity, and embraced the GOGI principle instead (Garbage Out, Gabage In).  Or, as he prefers to call it without a trace of irony whatsoever, "good customer service".

"I think there must be something wrong with out processes. I keep sending emails out to clients, and they keep sending replies back saying that they don't understand what they're supposed to do. We must be making it too hard for them."

Forest meets trees

Ted E.: "I think there's something wrong with our processes. I send the clients incomplete gibberish in an email, and they keep writing back to say they don't understand."

Talking in Manglish

The Invertebrate is talking to the Stress Fiend about converting some information over to web documents. I'm only half-listening, because the Stress Fiend and I are pretty much in agreement on what we need to do with the information, but then The Invertebrate says something that catches my attention and makes me snort with badly-suppressed laughter.

"What? Did I say something?"

Nod.  The Invertebrate plays back the last parts of the conversation.

"It was html-erise, wasn't it?"

* snort *

The Fear

Working party statements you should be grateful aren't aimed at your team: maximising synergies to provide improved service delivery.

It's all in the presentation.

Thirty minutes after stating that there was something he wanted to check with us, Ted E. finally unveils the small but crucial fact that actually gives the long, meandering rant a smattering of relevance. Unfortunately he chooses this long after the point where everyones' eyes have glazed over and they've given up hope of there ever being a point.

This is what I imagine it feels like to be slowly devoured from the feet up by diseased gerbils with bad breath.

Word for the day

lunger, n. a person suffering from a chronic disease of the lungs ; especially: one who is tubercular.
(Merriam-Webster online)

We seriously have to quarantine the team located a couple of partitions over: plastic floor-coverings, floor-to-ceiling drop sheets, biohazard suits, disinfectant spray... the works. It was bad enough they've been sounding like a tuberculosis clinic for the last fortnight, but now one of them has just returned from an overseas holiday and brought something nasty back with them. A large dog concealed in their chest cavity, perhaps.

I half-expect to hear screams of terror from over the walls as an Alien erupts from their ribcage and goes on a  rampage.

Client Service

Ted E.'s long-used excuse for flinging rubbish information at clients like an incontinent caged monkey, and for randomly attacking everyone that fails to do likewise is that it's good client service, where "good" = "something, anything, as long as I don't have to think about it".

A member of another team has just told Ted E. that a client needs something by close of business today.

Ted E.'s response?  "Stiff shit."

Ted E's considered response? Walk over to the Stress Fiend, tell her that she'll need to look after it, and that the client "has written all this shit over his request, and he can't have it. You'll need to tell him that."

Mice can "scroll" - perhaps you've heard of this term?

No, I didn't just fling off some made-up, random reply to a client's enquiry.

Yes, I know there's a standard response to that query, and of course I used it.  I rewrote the damn thing from scratch, remember, to replace the abomination you copy-and-pasted together from a dozen differenty-formatted sources without understanding anything you were talking about. 

I'm hardly likely to forget anything associated with something that would have made small children weep and goats go blind simply from looking at it, now, am I?

(I'd have been less annoyed if he'd actually looked at the text right below the client's reply where he would have seen exactly what I sent them.)

Perhaps the Mafia are on to something here.

I'm running late for work, and arrive to find Ted E. taking advantage of my absence by pinning The Invertebrate down to continue his complaint about the issue from the other day; the same one he didn't want to discuss in a meeting yesterday (because then someone might actually be on hand to refute his craziness), and one of the same issue he's been arguing against on the general principle of "I don't like it" for the past year now.

I'm polite and don't butt in until The Invertebrate asks me to come over to clarify something about how things are supposed to work (partly because Ted E.'s argument in favour of his solution doesn't  - and can't - make any sense; and partly, I suspect, so that even Ted E. can see that his madness is given a fair hearing).

I only last a few minutes before snapping. Ted E. is suggesting different ways of doing things that he thinks are better, each of which (in typical Ted E. fashion) generates its own problems by either creating extra manual tasks for someone else, cutting off information to users and other teams, or creating scope for more errors to creep in unnoticed. At no point is he ever actually able to say what's wrong with the model we've been running with or explain why it needs to be replaced.

(Actually I know why he thinks it needs to be replaced - because the current system requires him to check something that comes up about once a fortnight, and which is flagged in our systems so that it almost literally says "Hey, Ted - check me! There's something here you need to look at!"  It's not something he even has to remember to do, and at most he has to tick a check-box - but the fact he has to do anything at all bothers him deeply.)

And then he tries to claim that the convoluted, patchwork processes he's suggesting and making up on the spot are perfectly manageable because of his masterful attention to detail and ability to flawlessly execute the instructions on the "Do" and "Don't" list everyone else has to prepare for him.

"Well, no," I snap, "It won't work that way, because that's exactly what you don't do."

And I proceed to rattle off several examples of the things I've been finding while covering the Stress Fiend's work, because I'm cranky, ill and tired of revisiting this argument and so many others every time Ted E. thinks he has a chance to get someone else to help him roll things back to the good old days before people worried about things like accountability, accuracy and him doing the job he's being overpaid to do.

Ted E. rocks back slightly. The Invertebrate looks off somewhere in the middle distance. There's the conversational equivalent of a tumbleweeds blowing past.

"Anyway," says The Invertebrate brightly, "that all makes sense to me, so we'll stick with that."

So now Ted E. isn't talking to me again, and probably won't until next week now. Publicly biting his head off within a few minutes of arriving at work might not be the most professional way to manage him, but it probably goes down a treat in Mafia circles. The verbal equivalent of punching him on the nose every morning when I walk through the door seems to be the only way to actually make him behave.

Still ... I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of pre-emptive beatings as a team management strategy. It seems a little bit too much like something Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld would come up with. Except for the part about it actually working.

The "How Not To" Guide to Weaseling

After yesterday's exchange with Ted E. I was expecting him to do his usual trick when he gets told something he doesn't want to hear - ignore what he's been told and go over my head.  I could hear him typing busily away yesterday afternoon, and considering this clearly had nothing to do with his actual job (one of the dubious perks of covering for the Stress Fiend's absence is that it lets me see firsthand a lot more of Ted E.'s malfeasance in action)  it seemed a pretty safe bet that only one thing could motivate him this much: seeing how much trouble he can make for someone else. 

So it didn't really come as much of a surprise today when he approached The Invertebrate to ask if we could have a team meeting, because there were some things he felt we should be discussing. What he meant he wanted to discuss was that he thought "someone" (i.e. not him) should be taking over the Stress Fiend's duties while she was away, and to take an opportunity to point out things he doesn't like about the way she does her job.

What he got instead was The Invertebrate cheerfully announcing (and I'm paraphrasing a little) "Oh, right - you'll want to talk about that email you sent me yesterday afternoon about the other stuff you don't like the way we're doing and were told to leave alone, and aren't happy about?"

Panic flashes across Ted E.'s face. Apparently I wasn't supposed to know about that.

He actually babbles as he tries to distance himself from his own email.  "Oh, uh, oh ... no.  I didn't mean that at all. I didn't actually want to talk about ... I ... uh ... no, I meant about who's going to do the Stress Fiend's job, not umm..."

And The Invertebrate continues on so obliviously that I'm almost tempted to suspect him of doing this on purpose. "Because that's something we'd probably need to look at as a group if you think there's a serious problem with it, just to make sure we get it resolved in a way that makes sure it does what we want it to do."

"Uh, no ... really ... I was just - I'm not. No, I'm happy with it. It's just, uh ...."

I mean, honestly, did he really think he was being stealthy and subtle? That I wouldn't know what he was up to, and that The Invertebrate would agree with everything he said and say nothing to me about it? It hasn't been a great week, and the panicky backpedaling as he tried to avoid painting himself as a weasel nearly made me laugh aloud.

No "Time Out" corner when you need one.

Ted E. is sulking. He came over to check whether something I'd done had been cleared by The Invertebrate first (where "check" = "I don't like how you've done this, don't understand it, and I'm sure you've got it wrong").

Yes, he's seen it.

Yes, we talked about it.

Yes, he's fine with it.

No, don't mess with it.

No, really. Don't touch it. At all.

No, I don't care if you don't understand it. It's not part of your job and never will be, so leave it alone.

Yes, this is the same way we did it last year that you didn't like.

No, seriously. I'm not kidding. Don't screw around with this. When you did it last time without telling anyone what you were up to, you sent the money into all the wrong accounts and it  took months to find and fix it.

Yes, I do know about that. Was I not supposed to?

No, I don't care that I've hurt your feelings.

Yes, you may return to your desk and sulk now.

(Apparently I have no patience today.  Possibly this has something to do with having just gone through a sample of his work over the last week to identify all the bits of his job that he either isn't doing correctly, or simply isn't interested in doing at all).

It's early onset Alzheimers, I swear...

Yes, you idiot.  For the fourth time in a week, just as we've been doing for the last eight months, and as we've written down for you repeatedly in the "Do" and "Don't" list you keep requesting and then steadfastly ignoring ... yes, everyone gets charged for that and no, you're not allowed to keep giving it out for free.

When it's written in black and white - when it's been written in black and white, expressly for you, for the better part of a year! - why is that so hard to remember?

Plague season

I wish I'd brought in a hammer and some nails today, because Ted E. is going to want to do his martyr act in an hour or so when reality begins to penetrate his skull (it's a slow process, akin to fossilisation).

The Invertebrate has phoned in sick, which means Ted E. will be even less manageable than usual   (he only ignores what The Invertebrate tells him 30% of the time, compared to 90% with me).  By itself that's not a huge issue, though, because over the last year we've progressively pulled away most of the real work from him because he simply can't be relied on to do any of it consistently or accurately. The only real challenge with managing Ted E.'s workload is to keep him from messing up everyone else's work, because not understanding any of it has never stopped him disliking how it's done and trying to change it without telling anyone what he's up to.

However, there's a message on The Invertebrate's phone that I can't access (because he's never shared his voicemail password) which I suspect will be the Stress Fiend saying she's sick today, too.  Ted E. was already grumbling because she took two rec. days last week after he'd been on holiday for a week and a half, so the thought of her having another day off appears to be more than he can bear.  He has strong philisophical issues with the concept of other people having time off, presumably because he can't answer any questions without someone to tell him the answers first and ends up having to admit that to the clients he's trying so hard to impress.

I have to leave early today to collect a child from school (one of my own, rather than a random selection).  I told him this an hour ago, but that was before he realised the Stress Fiend probably wasn't going to show.  Whether it's actually sunk in yet that he'll be here alone for an hour and a half this afternoon is doubtful, but when it does his reaction will be neither graceful nor mature.

Sometimes it's worth coming to work.

Ted E. Tantrum: he's having an argument with the Stress Fiend about an order he's trying to place and getting confused about, because the website is asking him questions he doesn't understand. The Stress Fiend tells him to leave it alone for the moment, as there's something she needs to check for him before he can proceed.

Ted E. decides the confusion is too  much to bear and proceeds to rip up the order.  "I don't understand any of this, and it's all just getting too complicated!" he declares.

The Invertebrate's eyes pop. The Stress Fiend looks ready to leap the desk and murder him.  I successfully suppress a fit of giggles.

Ted E. shambles out the office, oblivious to the reaction he's caused, complaining as he goes that he has a headache and thinks he'll need to go home soon.

Ugly mirror images

Ted E. takes something to The Invertebrate for discussion.  It takes The Invertebrate a couple of minutes to work out what Ted E. is talking about (it's something the rest of us we were talking about two hours ago - there's that time lag again).

Ted E. outlines his proposition.

The Invertebrate explains what the situation actually is.

Ted E. repeates everything The Invertebrate says, but somehow contrives to get it exactly the opposite way around. "So that's it, isn't it?" he says with some satisfaction, apparently feeling he's proven his point.

"Er, yeah... Except, the other way around."

"What?"

The Invertebrate explains Ted E.'s "point" back to him.

"Oh, of course. That's exactly what I said."

But wait! There's more! Isn't there?

Ted E. is taking a week off. I'm always amused by the fact we pay him more to not be here than we do to have him in the office but, as that also applies to me, it's not something I can read a lot into.  At the team meeting he was asked what he had that we'd need to look after while he was away. He outlines two tasks, one of which we all do (his idea of performing this same task is to look for work he thinks other people should be doing, or find things to blame people for - so no-one really considers this part of Ted's job worth worrying about) and the other takes only 10-20 minutes, although he likes to make out that it's a constant stream of work that keeps him busy all day ... not that these two things are mutually exclusive.

I think The Invertebrate's surprise must have registered, because Ted scrambled for other things. Perhaps unwisely, he latched onto a once-a-month process he guards jealously because it makes him sound like he knows what he's doing.

"Nah, mate, that's okay," The Invertebrate assures him, "the Stress Fiend and I have already talked about that and she'll take care of that."

The Stress Fiend nods, happy to stick the knife in. "It should only take me half an hour.  An hour at most."

(I must admit, I've been looking forward to this team meeting for precisely this reason: it's a legitimate opportunity to make Ted E. tell the entire team how little he actually does, and how little most of it matters).

Master of time and space. Not.

Caution: may contain traces of Ted E. logic.

A client submits a request for some items.  Ted E. reviews the request, takes a guess at which of our technical staff is most likely to carry out the work, and sticks a note on the request asking the tech to ask the client to contact us to confirm that this is the right stuff before we order it.

Except ... except the tech won't actually see the notes from Ted E. until after the items have been ordered, shipped, and are here to be set up for the client.  I know all this, because the tech just rang to check what the client originally ordered, which makes me suspect the answer is "the wrong thing".

And Ted E. knows this is how things work, so I'm not sure how he expected his useless note to achieve anything without resorting to either telepathy or time travel.

Looking for patterns in the madness

I know I shouldn't be looking for logic in this, but Ted E. has proposed a process where we need to reconcile two reports, and look at what items can be reassigned from inventory and what ones need to be ordered in afresh.  So the inventory report is run first, and then compared against a second report showing outstanding requests: of necessity, we want the data in both reports to be current so we can see exactly how much we really need to order.

Ted E. proposes that as soon as the reconciliation is done, we immediately run the inventory report again and use the results (now stripped of anything that can be reassigned and rendered optimally useless), use that as the basis for a reconciliation that could be as much as a month away.

I've tried re-reading his proposal several times and even reading it backwards (sometimes his emails make as much or more sense that way) I can't see how it's possible to interpret his email as suggesting anything else. Even by his standards this makes absolutely no sense.

An impromptu survey

Some of you might have noticed (or not, if you're reading this through an RSS feed) that I've been playing with a Twitter feed to do some mini-updates. That's it over there in the right-hand column - have a quick look.

I'll wait.

...

So could I have a quick show of hands, please - is anyone actually reading them?  I'll probably keep them up in either case, but I'm just curious.

Telling Tales

Ted E. drifts past The Invertebrate's desk and begins whispering conspiratorially.

"I just had a look at the wiki for the section, and Gollum has posted a large technical document there about how to look after a particular service."

"Yeah?"

"I didn't think anyone was supposed to be posting anything there yet. I thought it was still being developed and we weren't supposed to be putting any information there."

"Well we still haven't worked out what's going up on our part, but there's nothing stopping other teams from adding stuff."

"But Gollum doesn't even look after that anymore! What's he doing posting that kind of information."

"Maybe he was the custodian of that document. He used to work in that area, so he probably posted it so that the rest of his old group can have access to it and update it."

It doesn't affect us, it's nothing to do with our team, and there's nothing the Invertebrate could do about it in any case.  Gollum is using the wiki precisely for what it's meant to be used.

"But he put it up where people can read it!"  He's still whispering, in case Gollum walks by and overhears. "I didn't think anyone was supposed to be doing that!"

The Invertebrate shrugs. What else is there to say?

But Ted still isn't mollified. "I'm just saying, is all..." he mutters, retreating to his desk.

I don't know where to start

This is incredible. Ted E. just forwarded through a document for the rest of the team to review, relating to the KPIs I mentioned a few days ago. His email, in essence, says "I don't know what I'm supposed to do, so can everyone please fill in all the blanks so I can submit this and say I've done it?"

It's just ... I don't know where to begin. It's written in what appears to be English, but makes no sense at all. It's the kind of written English you'd get if you taught a basic vocabulary to a chimpanzee, sat it in front of a word-processor, and then proceded to beat the chimpanzee about the head with an iron bar until it sustained brain damage.

Most people, when they don't understand something, can still explain their incomprehension in a way that makes it possible for others to understand what they're not grasping and explain it to them. But Ted E. operates on the next level, where he understands so little that it's actually impossible for him to explain his confusion in terms that would allow anyone to work out what he's even talking about.

If it was deliberate, it would be classed as performance art. But it's not. It's just a jaw-droppingly unintelligible mixture of full-screen screen captures (he must have finally figured out what the "Print Screen" button does), text pasted in from others' emails and documents (still in its original formatting, just to add to the overall surrealism of the reading experience), and some randomly-inserted comments from him that have no obvious connection to the surrounding elements.

I can't even tell where he's suggesting something, where he's asking a question, and where he's provinding something for the sake of "information". I think at some point he's proposing that we simply duplicate the Morass, including all the old and outdated documentation (99% of what's there, at a conservative estimate) ... along with photos of departed staff members? What???

Ted E. in time lapse

Yesterday's team meeting: "This is wrong, I don't like it,and someone needs to fix it the way I think it should be fixed."

Five minutes later, after being asked to explain why it was wrong: "I don't understand this, and it's stupid, and I don't want to talk about it anymore.

This morning: "No-one answered my question about this."

The Invertebrate then tries to explain (again) to Ted E. the difference between FlexLM, local client installations, and using software via a remote terminals. It's hard to tell who's going to have the cerebral haemorrhage first from the strain.

(I keep well clear of it: I lost 45 minutes of my life and 95% of my reserves of patience yesterday explaining to Ted E. yet again why it's fine to write off something that expires after a year, but not something that we need to hang on to indefinitely).

---

* Ted always reverts to calling them dumb terminals, but technically that term can apply to any computer he's using, so the rest of us try to avoid creating ambiguity.

Slappable Clients: the return

Submitted via a web form:

"I have a request to approve for one of my staff.  The software seems to be very expensive and I want to check he has ordered the correct product."

... and that's all he'll tell us. He doesn't identify what area he manages or, more importantly, who the staff member is, or what software the extravagant miscreant wants to order.

Tech support begins at home

"I can't edit this web page. Each time I double-click on it, it opens in my web browser."

"Try right-clicking on it instead of double-clicking."

 - click-click - 

"It still opens in the browser."

 - click-click - click-click - 

"No, right-click."

 - click-click - 

"I don't understand."

"Don't double-click on it. Use the mouse button on the right. Once."

 - click-click - 

"It's broken. Each time I do it brings something up and then it disappears again before I can read it."

 - click-click - 

"Just click on it once."

 - click-click - 

"Once!"

 - click - 

"It's not doing anything."

 - click-click - 

"Now it's opened in the browser again!"

"Did you use the right mouse button?"

"Yes!"

 - click -

"... no. Now it's showing me a list of things. I haven't seen these before. What do I do?"

"You wanted to edit the file, right?"

"Yes."

"So select 'Edit' from the menu it's showing."

"I don't see it."

"..."

"Oh, wait. Now I can edit these files!"

Which, honestly, is the last thing either the Stress Fiend or I wanted him to be able to do, but if The Invertebrate gives him enough rope at least I can hope he'll hang himself.

The game is called "Put up, or shut up"

One of the real sources of pain for this team has been the long-time lack of real KPIs or duty statements. What we've had (and what's made it so hard to manage Ted E.) is that the ones we have had are so toothless and generic that it's impossible to measure any kind of performance against it. Points were awarded, essentially, for turning up at some point during the day and looking at your email. You didn't need to do anything productive with it - just look at it. Even reading it was optional, as Ted E. demonstrated time and again. So one of the many challenges facing The Invertebrate was working out what people should be doing, and how to measure their actual ability. 

Two of the things that Ted E. has been complaining relentlessly about, but contributed nothing towards resolving, have been having to give people information on the phone ("Why can't we just give everyone access to all our systems?"*) and the different information resources used across our area such as wikis and shared documents ("They're just another place to have to look for stuff, and I don't like them and don't know how to use them."**)

Finally it wears The Invertebrate down, and he has a bright idea.

"Tell you what, Ted - those can be your KPIs.  Find out what information the other teams want, whether they want access to our systems, and what we need to do to make it available to them. Then you can look at our part of the wiki and begin working out what needs to go there and how we should organise it."

Ted E., of course, is aghast. He spends the first month after that complaining constantly to the other teams that he's been told to achieve something. Another month passes and he realises that the tasks aren't going to go away if he ignores them, and that for the first time since he started here he's going to undergo a performance review where he'll actually have to demonstrate that he's made a legitimate effort to do something.

To his dismay, he discovers that the other teams don't want direct access to our systems for much the same reasons I don't want them to have access. He's going to have to keep answering half-a-dozen phone calls a day (I made him keep a phone log once for a couple of weeks to quantify how busy he was with the phone - his busiest day was 15 phone calls in 8 hours). So that was a setback for him, but it's given him something new to complain about. 

Much more entertaining was his very late realisation that he hadn't just been asked to look at the organisation's wiki and complain about what he didn't like, but had to suggest a useful way to remedy this. He asked The Invertebrate to explain again to him what he was supposed to do and almost had a coronary when he misunderstood the answer and thought he was being asked to actually write content for other people to read (and complain about). He relaxed visibly when The Invertebrate clarified that all he had to was propose a workable structure.

Then he went wild-eyed and surly when The Invertebrate clarified that writing content was going to be part of his next round of KPIs.

It's not quite the regular beating that Ted E. needs to keep him in line, but it will do for now.

---

* Answer: because it's an unintuitive and unnecessarily complex home-grown system that no-one completely understands; 95% of the information in there isn't relevant to the handful of phone queries Ted E.'s trying to get out of answering; and experience dictates that we can't trust the other teams to use the 5% that is relevant responsibly (or even legally). 

** The Ted Solution here is that we should continue to hide our own information in The Morass, and complain loudly that no-one tells him anything or writes anything down for him where he can find it without thinking.

Human spam

A member of another team drops by to confer with the Stress Fiend about a training course they both went on, and how to access the systems they were trained in.

Visitor: "It's just that since we did the course, I haven't needed to get into our webpages to edit any of them and I've forgotten how we do it."

Stress Fiend: "After the course, you should have received an email with all your login details."

Ted E. has been eavesdropping madly, afraid of missing a chance to show off his vast knowledge of what's going on. He siezes on "email" and "webpages" and inserts himself into the conversation:

"Email? You got an email? There was an email about spam and websites this morning. Or maybe it email spam trying to get you to go to websites. Anyway, there was email."

The Stress Fiend ignores him, but you can feel the Contemptometer climb a couple of notches. The visitor just stares, wondering who this lunatic in a corporate uniform is and how he got inside the building.

Introducing Gollum

There are two team leaders here with the same name, so a couple of us have taken to calling them Gimli and Gollum because that's exactly what they look like (and even sums up how they act).

One of Gollum's team members is departing, and so he decided to have a farewell morning tea for them, and invite people from some of the other teams along.  It was a nice thought, but something was missing...

"By the way, where is Mike, anyway? Shouldn't he be here for his own farewell?"

"Oh, he had a university lecture to go to, but I didn't want to wait for him to get back before breaking out the cake," says Gollum, team leader extraordinaire.

So easily offended...

I bumped into Ted E. in the corridor on the way into the office this morning.  Being polite, and because he's been known to turn it into an issue if people don't, I said "Good morning" and was rewarded with pure surliness in exchange. Which actually doesn't bother me, as I'm much happier when Ted E. doesn't try to make small talk, but I was puzzled by the sheer belligerence he radiated at the sight of me.

Then I get inside and discover why.

No-one else is here yet, and I've turned up early for a meeting. And, suddenly noticing Ted E. is still wearing his backpack, he's running half an hour late (even later if you believe his much-boasted and often-disproved unofficial starting time) and presumably I've thwarted his planned fudging of his hours.

Mr Helpful

Volunteering to look after a task, Ted E. style:

1. volunteer to take over a task;
2. use the help desk tool to assign each instance of that task against The Invertebrate because you've decided because he mentioned it last, it's clearly his responsibility now;
3. forget how to use the help desk software to do this;
4. ask The Invertebrate for help in assigning the Ted-tasks to him;
   
5. realise The Invertebrate is in fact your team leader and wasn't meant to know about this;
6. prevaricate madly in a feeble attempt to salvage an illusion of credibility. 

Meanwhile, on Planet Ted...

A parting email from Ted E. today, complaining about changes made to a function within our database. The trouble is ... it's never worked the way he seems to think it used to in the previous version.  I've even gone back five versions and checked.

And for it to have ever worked the way he clearly remembers it used to would invalidate the whole purpose of having that function in the first place.

"It used to let us do something it was specifically introduced to stop us doing. This is an urgent problem in need of fixing!"

I don't think so.

Mr Unreliability

Oh dear. Now he's trying to overcompensate by inventing "what if?" scenarios to get out of doing actual work. I thought he was supposed to be getting sick and leaving early?

The Friday Entertainment

Ted E. is struggling (visibly struggling, for once, instead of quietly hiding the debris of his fumblings under the electronic rug).

First, his laptop has crashed. Ted E. lacks the basic technical competence to troubleshoot what's gone wrong or even take an educated guess. There's not actually anything wrong with that and,  realistically, it's how we'd prefer non-technical staff deal with their problems. It's just Ted's bad luck that everyone else in the team has sufficient technical skills that they don't need to run for help as soon as something fails and, when they do, they have sufficient knowledge to be able to explain the problem.

So he's had to switch computers to the one that's been left free since we lost our fixed-term person (and it feels vaguely blasphemous to see Ted sitting in their chair - I keep wanting to tell him to move before he contaminates all the good work she did), and now both the Invertebrate and I can, quite literally, look over his shoulder to see what he's actually working on.

He doesn't like that.

While using this computer, he's also been expected to set up his basic software access himself, as everyone else in the team is more than capable of doing. Ted E., I strongly suspect, has never had to do anything of the sort and he's floundering noisily. Every minor thing, where a normal person would think to, I don't know, actually look for information or a file that isn't where he's used to finding it on his laptop threatens to turn into a major drama production.

The only thing that's restraining him, I think, is that he's aware the "problems" stem from his limitations and unwillingness (or inability) to acquire the same skills as the rest of the team, because he doesn't feel he's paid enough. And that's making him increasingly ill-tempered, so that he's started claiming he's feeling sick and will need to leave early today.

Not a bad day at all, really.

He's on a roll today! Now he's complaining to The Invertebrate about a terribly complicated part of his job that he does once a week, and takes him three hours to do (three hours seems to be his magic number), but which the Stress Fiend can normally do in about half an hour.

It's a process I was arguing last year we shouldn't be doing at all because this team isn't resourced or positioned to manage the particular system. Ted E. enjoys doing it, though, because he can pretend he's working and can highlight all the mistakes people in other teams have made in entering data.

The Invertebrate has taken exactly my point of view (that we're the last area that should be trying to manage this, and the responsibility lies with another team entirely) and Ted E. is now watching with horror at the prospect of a lot of his make-work vanishing. He's back-pedaling furiously, trying to claim it's not that much work, doesn't take up much of his time, and it's worth hanging onto even though it's not part of what we do.

The sixty-year old spoiled child

Ted E. is having a sulk. There's been a part of his job he spontaneously stopped doing several weeks ago because he didn't see the point. The Stress Fiend tried explaining several times that there was a point, because it saved her interrupting the flow of her work further down the line when she had to go look up the information Ted E. had decided he didn't feel like including when he was doing related work in that system.

Ted E., naturally, didn't consider this relevant and ignored her.

The Stress Fiend has been more strident about this in the last week or two and finally mentioned it to The Invertebrate, who's recently been growing more aware of Ted E .'s shiftless ways.  This morning, he got Ted E. to walk him through what Ted E. actually did, including why it wasn't worth him doing this bit of his job that he'd dropped without bothering to tell anyone.

Like a lot of Ted's "labour-saving" exercises, it collapsed pretty much immediately upon examination because the only person it makes less work for is himself, while adding to others' workload exponentially as they try to work around it. He tried to bargain his way out of having to do it by showing The Invertebrate examples of the kind of entries he didn't think were necessary, and got progressively more ill-tempered as The Invertebrate (who, on current trends, is probably in line for a name change) pointed out why it was necessary to spend 30 seconds updating those records.

"But that will take me three hours! I've got hundreds to do!" complains Ted, gearing up for a tirade before realising that:

1. someone might point out he only has hundreds because he hasn't been doing them at all; and
2. he's just started to complain about the injustice of being asked to do the job he's paid for.

But dignified withdrawals are apparently for lesser men.

"Fine, then, I"ll just do them all, shall I?"

Reflex action

Instinctively mauled Ted E. for asking exactly the same question he tried to fob off on to everyone else last week and turned into a major production when we wouldn't let him have his way. Possibly shouldn't have but, hell, it's not like he didn't have it coming.

Honestly, who'd be a team leader anyway?

Ted E. has been in a bad mood all morning, trying to pass work and phone calls off on to everyone else and getting rebuffed pretty much every time (generally in the form of "Fine, if you claim you don't know anything about it, this is how you do it - go through it with the client and remember it for next time"). 

Then he decided to pick through what he decided must have been an error by a departed team-member, only to be told by me it was a typo and had been corrected. Then he decides that the answer is still wrong, ignores the subsequent explanation as to why the answer is still right but the issue will be obsolete in two weeks anyway and there's no need to waste more of his time (or my life) trying to score points.

"I explained all this when I replied to your email," I tell him after he comes over to my desk to harangue me about it.

"I haven't read it yet. But I think I'm right" he claims, and rushes back to his desk to begin burrowing into the database he can't use to look up information he doesn't understand in order to argue against someone else's decision that he won't accept.

I tell him again (across the room this time) that he's wasting time on something that isn't an issue now and won't even exist in a fortnight. Thankfully, the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate actually chime in to support that.

Ted E. sulks. Very conspicuously.

So The Invertebrate then has to begin the slow and painful task of smoothing Ted E.'s ruffled, mangy, lice-riddled feathers.  I can't decide whether that makes him a better team leader than I would have been, or if he just hasn't had enough Ted E. exposure to have lost all patience with the wretch.

(Hah! Now he's complaining about not feeling well - he already leaves early on Fridays, so maybe this means he's planning on having Monday off. Again. I can only hope).

Welcome to Schadenfreude, population: me

Muah-hah-hah.

The Invertebrate is trying to explain something to Ted E. and getting the full "it's change and I don't want to know about it" treatment, mixed in with a healthy dose of "everything you say is invalid because you spelled one word incorrectly".

Oh, and there's been a late addition: "yes, that's always been broken, but it's how we've always done it so I don't think we should fix it".

Well I'm enjoying it, at least.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and the Surreal

Good: I have an ongoing position for the first time in nearly four years, and on a slightly higher pay scale.

Bad: it's here.

Ugly: we can't afford to keep the team member I most want to keep when their contract runs out.

Surreal: we can afford to keep Ted E. and the Stress Fiend.

"The good news is you have twenty-four hours to live. The bad news is I forgot to tell you yesterday."

The BSAA's best friend.

Ted E. noticed I've tried to limit his capacity to give the go-ahead to install extra copies of software we're not entitled to.

"Yes," he says, "I thought there was something suspicious about those numbers, but I checked with The Invertebrate and he said it was okay to go ahead with rolling them out and charging clients for them."

What was especially discouraging is that while this was exactly the kind of thing Ted E. routinely trots out to justify doing something he knows he shouldn't (and is lying most of the time), I wasn't convinced The Invertebrate wouldn't have said just that because he wasn't clear on what was really happening. Ted E., after all, has a knack for presenting only one side of a situation. 

Which raises the interesting hypothetical: What would he be writing about me if he had the technical competence to maintain a blog? 

"todayy Someone made changes w/out checking w'me first  I do not think Someone shuld be doing this, & i do not like them."

But anyway... I checked with The Invertebrate afterwards and he was appropriately horrified. Unfortunately the horror had diminished somewhat by the time he caught up with Ted E. and there were no real repercussions, but he's more aware now of why people want to beat Ted E. away with a stick when he comes near their work.

Some context

And while I'm being unmotivated, here's how The Invertebrate earned his name.

There was a process change I was trying to implement last year while I was Acting Team Leader.  It made my role easier, it made the role of the person placing purchase orders easier, it addressed some of the horrible legacy issues we're suffering with inventory and accounts, had no impact on the clients, and no impact on Ted E.'s job.

Naturally he fought it tooth and nail, because "That's not how we used to do it".  In fact it was ... kind of.  It hadn't been done properly or consistently, but it was being done.  Ted E. dug his heels in further, claiming there was a four-year-old written process explaining how it should be done, and that, by god, was how we should be doing it.

(When I finally found this apparent Holy Grail of business processes - it was carefully hidden - it turned out to be a poorly written scrawl by Ted E. about he handles a superficially similar situation that wasn't remotely applicable).

We went ahead with the change anyway ("It doesn't affect me and I don't like it" didn't cut it as a valid objection) and began phasing it in, letting natural attrition cycle out the older models.  Then The Invertebrate was appointed, and Ted E. ramped up his "It's not how we did it in the old days" spiel and turned it into a major drama production at the next team meeting. Fortunately he'd telegraphed what he was up to, so I had time to prepare my arguments (again) for why the change was useful and necessary and had no impact on Ted E.

The team meeting went reasonably well as a result: Ted E. blustered, waved his printed copy of his process, and stabbed his notepad with his biro while loudly declaring "We have a process!"  The Invertebrate wavered towards my suggestion, agreed that he could see the value and the sense in it, and seemed surprised and relieved that I had no problem with Ted E.'s process when it was applied to the appropriate situation.  Ted E. got louder and more hysterical.

The next day, The Invertebrate complained to another team member about having to make a decision.  "They both dug their heels in.  If one of them doesn't back down I'll have to decide what to do."  Which didn't earn him a lot of sympathy: he's the team leader, so his job is to make decisions based on what he thinks is in the interests of the team's ability to perform its role, not on the basis of which of his team members proves the most pigheaded.

I wrote a four-page business case outling my suggestion, it's pros and cons, implementations, risks, etc.  Ted E. continued the "I don't like it, it's not like the old days" diatribe and circulated the same copy of his irrelevant half-page how-to instructions.  Two of the team members were strongly in favour of the change, one was happy with it, and only actively opposed it.

The Invertebrate procrastinated.

 

After several weeks, he sent an email from home announcing his decision. He prefaced his verdict by stating that he understood the team was polarised on this issue (where "polarised" = "everyone affected is in favour; the one person unaffected is fanatically opposed"), and that the best solution was to make no decision at all for a few more months until the position I've been acting in on a series of fixed-term contracts was filled on an ongoing basis. At which point ... I don't know, maybe the successful applicant would make the problem go away by agreeing with everything Ted E. said to avoid further outbursts of middle-aged male hysterics.

Up until this point the Team Leader had struck me as wavering and very uncertain of his job and what it entailed.  Taking over a month to produce an email of such spinelessness and unwillingness to make a decision that might anger the psychopath-in-residence put this well beyond simple wavering and indecision, and so "The Invertebrate" was born. 

And I think even The Invertebrate had reservations about his decisions to make no decision: the email's security settings were set so high that it couldn't be replied to, forwarded, copied, printed or, well, anything really, except read.

And screen-captured, naturally.

But that, ladies and gentlemen, was the point where I decided that even if I applied successfully for my job of the last three years, there was simply no way I could continue working under the Invertebrate.

Crossing the line between cynicism and bitterness

*sigh*

Definition of wasting time: developing criteria to use to sort out one of the many ungodly and undocumented processes in our systems here, which Ted E. will oppose on principle because:

1. it's change;
2. it's not how we did things in the old days (which is only half-true - this was done in the old days, but inconsistently and poorly);
3. "I'm concerned we're creating more work for ourselves" (trans. "This means that work I've been trying to make for other people and then blame them for not doing it the way I think it should be done will come back to me to look after and I'll f**k it up";
4. his parents didn't beat him enough as a child.

And the Invertebrate will side with him because:

1. he won't understand the distinctions I'm trying to make (this is a contractual agreement - this is off-the-shelf inventory);
2. Ted E. explains things in simple terms that he can understand. They're also overly-simplistic terms that miss 75% of the salient points, but that's incidental;
3. he doesn't want to make a decision until the senior procurement role is filled, because then someone else will magically make the problem go away for him, presumably by agreeing with everything Ted E. says;
   
4. his parents let him eat too many lead paint chips when he was young.

The burden of history

"Dear software vendor,

"We have some of your highly-specialised and no-doubt-horribly-expensive software installed here, and we're pretty sure someone in the organisation bought it at some point in the past, only we can't find any record of who or when.

"We've also lost the installation media for it although, to be honest, I can't find any record of us ever having received any to begin with (that whole 'cannot find any purchase records'  thing I mentioned). But we must have got it from somewhere and, you know, if we had a CD for it that's almost the same as having a valid licence.

"So would you mind sending me some replacement media? I'm not totally convinced you should, but the previous Team Leader left large, noisy footprints over any internal correspondence related to it, so now everyone believes we ran the whole process and have all the answers even if we don't have the CDs, purchase records, contact details for the business or, well, anything really.

"Regards etc..."

The Slug Trail of Culpability

He had to wait until it was (possibly) my last month here, but he's finally done it: Ted E. has been in tampering with the database again, deleting records, creating and selling phantom software inventory the organisation has no entitlement to deploy ... and this time he's left his fingerprints all over everything, and not mentioned anything of what he was doing to anyone else in the team.

The beauty of it is, I wasn't even looking for any of this: I just stumbled across a couple of things that unfolded into a chain of deletions, arbitrary data editing, and no consultation with the people who were actually responsible for the stuff he was messing with.

I don't have any great hope that he'll get even a token rap over the knuckles for this, but (finally) he's left a trail that's too clear and obvious to be dismissed as simple error or miscommunication, and that he can't just bluster his way out of without digging himself deeper.  So even if I finish here in four weeks (and, oh, do I want to!), I can leave knowing I've put a serious and lasting dent in his pretensions to being an efficient and effective team player.

The Howling

I'm sure he does this on purpose. HP aren't the first company whose name he chronically mispronounces, but it's not like they're a small company, or a new company - they were around for most of last century. Yet somehow, on his planet, they're called Howlett-Packard and appear destined to remain so for eternity...

Team bonding

Despite much noise about the virtues - and indeed the necessity - of the team working together in the same area to improve communication, the Invertebrate has moved like lightning to sieze a temporarily vacant office and has holed up in there*. Without, I might add, bothering to notify the team as a whole, so half of us spent the first part of the day assuming he simply wasn't here.

---

* I think he's actually trying to hide from Ted E.  Or else he's run through the same figures I was thinking about on the weekend** and has realised we're completely unsustainable as a business unit and wants someplace private to cry, because he has to make it work.

** Yes, I really was. No, I don't have a life.

Why some people invite violence

"This is something I don't have anything to do with at all, and I don't understand why we do it this way, and don't want to hear about why we do it that way from the people it affects. But I think we should stop doing it, anyway, because I don't understand it and think there's a half-arsed shortcut we can take instead."

"Madness?"

My team are gearing up to start a fight about something that looks to be mostly our fault... We recently had our website redesigned, and there are some issues with the template and structure we were obliged to use, and now it seems the help desk has been instructed to forward any client complaints about this directly to us.

So the Stress Fiend and The Invertebrate are already up in arms at us being held accountable for design decisions that weren't ours to make when I field another call complaining about the eccentric order we've listed stuff in.

I make the mistake of trying to investigate: is this something we can fix, as I suspect it is? Well, yes ... apparently it is. In fact the crazy sequence has been manually configured by the Stress Fiend according to criteria or her own devising ("I'll list things in the order that I think people will know it by, rather than consistently or by its published name").

But we're not going to fix this. Of course not.

No, instead we're going to blame this, too, on the design team and rant angrily and irrationally. We'll also blame the clients, because we were trying to think like them and how dare they not think we think the way we think they think (yes, the logic really is that convoluted).

The Invertebrate has also written a terse and self-righteous email, which he's now congratulating himself on (he likes flame wars with other team leaders, particularly ones he used to have to report to. I think he has some authority issues). And he's instructed the Stress Fiend not to waste any more time correcting the mistakes we were "forced" to make.

The fact I work in the same workspace as these people should in no way be taken to mean that I endorse their madness in any whatsoever.

Oh, get a room...

Conversation between Ted E. and the Invertebrate. With footnotes longer than the actual conversation in order to accomodate all the stupidity and hypocrisy hovering around it.

Ted E.: It must be so hard for you coming into this job when there's so much that needs tidied up and put in order after all these years of things not being done properly.*

The Invertebrate: Yes, yes ... it's been difficult, and I always seem to have so much work to do, and there's just so much to learn.**

Ted E.: But we're making a lot of progress now, though. So many things are finally starting to come together now.*** May I gently sponge your fevered brow, and feed you freshly-peeled grapes, my lord?^

---

* Bizarrely, these years of neglect are the same Golden Age Ted E. likes to reminisce about, when everything was a glowing model of smooth efficiency and simplicity and Ted E. never had to engage his two brain cells because he could always find someone else to pass the problem along to.
** Because, of course, no-one could have foreseen either of those things when taking up a middle-management position in an area you have no experience in whatsoever.
*** Which has nothing to do with the Invertebrate whatsoever, and everything to do with the efforts of a single team member that Ted E. has spent months resisting, and trying to bully and undermine whenever he's thought he could get away with it.
^ Okay, I might have made that bit up.

Unfulfilled ambitions

Walking back from a meeting, and Ted E. reminisces about his childhood for no readily apparent reason: "Did you ever used to tie cotton around the legs of blowflies? That always used to be fun..."

So much becomes clear about his behaviour: he's obviously a frustrated serial killer too shiftless and lazy to ever have moved beyond torturing insects and co-workers.

One more time, with pictures.

Ted E. is having something explained to him for the nth time. The hyper-efficient team member is painstakingly showing him the process for doing something he's constantly complaining about, but stubbornly refuses to learn.

Ted E: "Oh, I'll need to get someone to write this down. It's all very complicated."

Hyper-Efficient Team Member: "I emailed you the workflow last week."

Ted E: "Really?"

Hyper-Efficient Team Member: "Yes. It was the one with all the pictures in it."

Me: [loud snort of laughter quickly turned into a cough]

Hyper-Efficient Team Member: "Oh. Or maybe I sent you the one without pictures by mistake..."

Which is uttered in a tone of such innocent apology that it becomes impossible for me to stay at my desk any longer.

Introducing the semi-functional illiterates

Ted E. is puzzled. He's been sending emails to an automated system rather than the staff who run the automated system, and one of them has finally emailed him back to tell him what he's doing, and why it won't get the kind of results he's hoping for.

They very kindly cc'ed the email to my entire group, which is why I now get to snigger at Ted E.'s expense.

But, as I say, he's puzzled ... and he's had to ask The Invertebrate if he understands what it means. And, if he does, can he please read it again to Ted E. and explain it as he goes.

"Must possess good communication skills..."

The Invertebrate: "It would be good to be able to do this in one foul swoop."

Professionalism: it's overrated anyway...

Paraphrasing ensues.

Email from Ted E. to me personally, cc'ed to the team in general:

1. Is the incomplete, inaccurate, and incoherent form email I cobbled together from copy-and-paste when I wasn't making lolspeak look like Shakespeare okay to send out to clients?
2. Shall we change how we do something I don't like doing and want to find lazy shortcuts for, when none of the reasons we do it this way have changed?
3. Where is the 2009 information for this? I've looked everywhere and it's not there, and no-one tells me anything.
4. Is there anything else I need to know about for 2009?

My reply (to Ted E. and team):

1. No, it wasn't client-friendly, was missing vital information, and looked like it had been plagiarised by the proverbial village idiot with a word-processor. I've written an English-language version that we'll use instead;
2. No, moron;
3. They're exactly in all the places you claimed you looked, and have been for several weeks (thank you Netware Info properties tab). Here are the paths in order to assist your meagre comprehension;
4. I don't know, is there?

I admit, I was greatly attempted to simply refer all these to the Invertebrate and let him agonise about the answers until he could find a car in need of repair ... but if Ted E. thought they were important enough to email to everyone, the least I could do was graciously accept the opportunity to beat him in public.

Creeping cynicism

After a hard morning trying to rewrite someone else's email, the Invertebrate has taken it upon himself to look after my division's transportation and maintenance needs instead. Rather than let the transport people do what they're paid to do and take care of organising spare tyres and replacement fuel caps, the Invertebrate is spending the afternoon zipping about the place buying the parts and delivering them personally.

I'm sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with having no background or experience in the area he's supposed to be managing.

Selling out?

I'm tossing up whether to enable Adsense on this page. Not because I'm particularly money-hungry (although free money is always nice) or because I feel a driving need to irritate people visiting the site.

No, it's because having seen Googe's context-sensitive ads in action, I'm morbidly curious to discover what they'd begin trying to sell people based on the content of my posts.

A quick update

We've reached the point again where I'm feeling mildly guilty about not having updated for a while and figure I should at least make a pretence of keeping this blog alive.

There are a couple of reasons for the silence. One is the ongoing onslaught of Ted E.'s shiftless stupidity has long since passed the point where I can easily make fun of it anymore, and the other has been the destabilising effect of getting a new Team Leader - which means, obviously, that I didn't get that job. If I did, we'd probably still be destabilised (well, Ted E. would, anyway), but at least I'd know why and I'd have some idea of where we were going from here.

I can't actually say I'm disappointed at not being Team Leader. What sane man would regret being denied the unbounded joy of micro-managing Ted E. and the Stress Fiend on a daily basis? Nor can I honestly say that the new Team Leader (henceforth dubbed The Invertebrate, for reasons that will become clear in future posts) doesn't deserve Ted E. as an underling.

So because I'm not feeling particularly bitter about coming a close second for the job*, I'll content myself with saying only this much about the Invertebrate for now:

When you have the complexion and charisma of a freshly-risen zombie, and no background or experience in the field you're now responsible for managing, you'd want a pretty impressive set of transferable skills and management experience to compensate, and the feedback from the interview panel was that he displayed these in abundance.

On paper.

We're hoping (with diminishing optimism) that eventually he'll reveal some of these qualities in his day-to-day performance but, nearly two months into his reign, he's still keeping his brilliance in check. Perhaps he's saving himself for a big start to 2009.

I could ask him, of course, but he's only been at work about half the time since he was appointed.

---

* However I'm very pissed off about some of the reasoning that went into it.

The surprise of surprise

I know I shouldn't be, but I'm surprised that Ted E. is surprised to discover the reason something isn't working is because he's doing it wrong.

His self-righteous rant is just starting to gather momentum when he actually looks at what he's complaining about.

"Oh. It's my fault."