Teaching pigs to sing would be easier.

The Stress Fiend continues trying to show La Mondaine what she's supposed to be doing.

"Now you just do this."

"I do this?"

"No, just this."

"Then this?"

"No, only this."

"Okay, then I do this?"

"No, just this."

"Oh, I get it. Then I do this?"

"No, just this."

"What about this?"

"No, only this."

... repeat for several minutes. Move on to next record.

This is why I try to leave him in his cave with the Precious.

"Hi, Gollum. We're about to go live with this software. Your team will be doing most of the support, so can you spare someone to do a couple of test install to make sure there are no unexpected tricks to it? That's all we're waiting on now."

"No! We're far too busy to check whether we're able to install something without incident! Give it to another team with fewer resources, who work in a completely different environment to test!"

This is why Gollum is loved and revered by his team: there aren't many team leaders around here willing to shield his people from learning stuff ahead of time that might be useful to them.

When the cat's away...

... well, let's face it, if mice were as retarded as Ted E. they'd play regardless of whether the cat was there or not.

Ted took advantage of me being off sick for a few days by restarting his campaign against how I've been managing recurring charging on some things.  This has come up a few times over the last twelve months or so, and several times already this year.  The last time saw The Invertebrate trapped in his office for an hour and a half trying to explain to Ted why (a) why these charges are different, and (b) why they needed to be handled differently (rather than Ted's favoured solution, which is a one-size doesn't-fit-anyone-except-maybe-Godzilla option). The Invertebrate came out thinking he'd made progress, but while we were at a meeting Ted spent the afternoon laboriously composing an email that boiled down to "I don't understand, I disagree, and here's how he can make it consistently fail to work for anyone."

This time around it was more of the same.  Instead of padding out the charging details with meaningless fluff, I've reworked the system slightly indicate the period for which the charge applied. I'm not sure quite what it is about this that bugs Ted, but bug him it very clearly is and he resumed harping while I wasn't around to shoot him down.

Then he went one further and rang my predecessor for some expert advice to bolster his case.  I won't go into all the reasons why this just beggars belief, but it was particularly funny that Ted chose this round of charging as the battleground, because it's one where my predecessor had us operating  in a massive breach of license compliance terms for several years (when I worked it out after I took over, it turns out we'd exceeded our usage by 1,667%).  I don't know what Ted actually told him, but it wouldn't really have mattered: his grasp of how our databse was actually used was only slightly less shaky than his grasp of how it needed to be used.

(And yet he was its principal designer. If you've ever wondered why I spend so much time in the background of the database repairing and modifying things, look no further for an explanation).

Not that this prevented Ted from declaring to The Invertebrate "I asked him because he knows all about how it's meant to work, and how we're supposed to be using it."  My predecessor agreed with Ted that we were definitely making too much work for ourselves, which was all the ammunition Ted needed to stroll into The Invertebrate's office to tell him we were doing things wrong, with a brief detour by the Stress Fiend to tell her:

"I've found a mentor who understands what I'm talking about and agrees with me."

Which, while almost certainly accurate from a technical point of view, didn't quite yield the results he expected.

"I lost it a little bit," The Invertebrate told me the next day, "Actually, I think I might have gone right off at him."  No "might" about it, apparently. According to the Stress Fiend, after the office door opened and Ted fled to lunch, The Invertebrate emerged looking a little sheepish, came over to her and asked:

"Uh, could you hear me yelling out here?"

Ted went home early with a headache, though, which always counts as a win.

The Invertebrate filled me in the next morning, because he'd placed it on the team meeting agenda "to get it behind us properly once and for all".  None of us were particularly looking forward to it, but being yelled at must have given even Ted a hint of where things were going because when the agenda item came around:

"No, no.  I understand now.  It all makes sense to me."

No. I don't believe it, either.

(We've all agreed this means in about two to four weeks it's going to come up again.  I estimate two, The Invertebrate leans optimistically towards four, but either way it's up to him to deal with it when it rears its stupid ugly head again, leaving me to sit quietly and listen for the yells from The Invertebrate's office. And The Invertebrate (hopefully) has learnt a valuable lesson - you need to brutalise Ted on a fairly regular basis if you want him to toe the line even temporarily.  It's not an ideal management style, but when you're not allowed to physically beat staff sometimes you just have to make do.)

Ted's ears pricked up later in the meeting when we mentioned my predecessor was coming over for a meeting this week, but appeared visibly crestfallen to learn his mentor had chosen one of Ted's official off-days for his visit.  Then he tried to find out whether my predecessor was reachable by any kind of instant-messaging client, but as Ted doesn't actually understand what instant messaging actually is, it was very easy to tell him "No, his organisation doesn't use Lotus Sametime" and watch his hopes of discrete consultation with the Master of All Things Licensing collapse.

I suspect he was destined for disappointment, anyway. The Invertebrate was still fuming about when he ran into the Mentor of Ted socially later that evening and "suggested" he not give Ted any further encouragement about how we should do things with systems my predecessor doesn't understand or have any part of.

Waste, guano, and Ted E.

We've just uncovered a hitherto unknown stroke of genius on Ted E.'s part, in his never-ending quest to save himself some work. One of Ted's tiny handful of duties is to duplicate software, label it, and distribute it to clients. Some of this software is available for both Windows and Macintosh, but very rarely on the same disc.

At some point Ted decided that having a separate label for the Windows and Mac versions fell into what he would class as "making extra work for ourselves" and simply edited the label template to make a generic label declaring the software to be "Win/Mac". After all, being able to tell the separate Windows and Mac discs apart would just be silly, right? The half-second it takes to choose one label over another - or the extravagant *handful* of seconds it would take to update the label - is clearly an unacceptable waste of corporate resources, even if, as resources go, Ted's about on par with the mined-out guano pits of Nauru.

La Mondaine is now wailing as she sorts through a pile of Ted's "Win/Mac" discs to work out which ones are which. Sadly that's not quite as funny as it sounds, but it's making the Stress Fiend suffer, too, so it's not without a positive side.

Morale not improving, beatings continuing

No, seriously, I don't know who you're talking about that used to come around all the time many years ago when you worked here and I didn't. And, really, I'm not interested in reminiscing about "the good old days" because a) they almost certainly weren't, and  b) I wasn't here then.

Also? When it's ten years old and about people who aren't here anymore? With neither point nor punchline, it's not even gossip - it's just useless trivia.

Week Two

The only way this could be more painful is, conceivably, if we cloned Ted and had Clone-Ted filling in for himself ... but I'm not actually convinced that would be the case.

La Mondaine is now badgering staff who've only been here a year over whether the daughter of a long-retired workmate is still doing the same job in an entirely different part of the organisation we almost never deal with that they were doing five years ago ... identifying the daughter, naturally, by first name only, looking puzzled when the new staff have no idea who she was talking about ("How could you not know this person?"), and leaving the new staff with the uncomfortable feeling there's a gaping hole in their understanding of the organisation.

She's still waiting to get access to all the systems she needs, so at the moment she's lurking over the Stress Fiend's shoulder being shown (again) what she'll be expected to do. Ordinarily, asking questions is a sign of a healthy mind. In this case, though, the gradually rising tone of frustration in the Stress Fiend's voice suggests otherwise.

Lambs still screaming? Check...

It's bad enough dealing with Ted E., but when I have to explain the same things to clients repeatedly I find myself wondering whether I shouldn't just resort to telling them "It puts the lotion in the basket, or it gets the hose again."


It certainly couldn't make them any more confused.

La Mondaine: week one

The first day of our

La Mondaine arrived in a state of high excitement, eager to pick up where she'd left years ago, renew old friendships, and throw herself into the exciting social whirlwind that this place is all about (instead of that tedious, pesky "work" stuff that some of us spend our day grappling with).

Thus far it's been a deeply and horrifyingly painful experience. And that's before she's even begun trying to do any work yet. God knows what kind of agony we're in for once she actually has to start engaging her brain in the present rather than just leaving it idling noisily in the past.

(On a related note, I've never been so grateful for the delay in getting someone set up with computer and network access here. It meant she grew bored watching the Stress Fiend work and left early. Technically the Stress Fiend was trying to train her in how things are done these days, but in practice it was like watching someone take their nine-month-old to see Shakespeare: grizzling, intermittent crying fits, and constantly wondering why it's not yet time for the next meal).

Firstly, La Mondaine talks constantly. She's not exceptionally loud - she certainly doesn't boom out the way the Cow-Orker could - but her voice is pitched to penetrate, makes everything sound like a question, and just. doesn't. stop. Perhaps desensitisation will come with time, but for the moment she's impossible to tune out.

And then The Invertebrate decides in an apparent burst of sadism that we'll have a team afternoon tea just so we can have a chat about where things will be going over the next few months. I'd already given this some thought, but wasn't overly surprised when our visions diverged: his, for instance, seems to be a lot lighter on the bloody axes, straitjackets and padded cells that loomed prominently in mine.

The first day went roughly as follows:

"No, that system 's been gone for years, too. The staff club and the Friday afternoon 'lunches'? Well the club's been shut for a couple of years now..."  (Coincidentally business declined as the number of hard-drinking oldtimers retired).

"Is this person still here? How about this other person? How about all the other people I wanted to come back to socialise with?"

"You mean you don't leave stuff in the Inbox forever in case someone's on holiday when the email arrives? How do they know every little thing that happened while they weren't here? You still have weekly meetings to discuss every new email that's arrived, don't you?"

By day two she was repeating back to us as "news" the very things we'd told her the day before: that certain people had left, old systems had been replaced, work practices had changed, etc.  Not that this prevented her from reacting to each new example of change with wide-eyed, breathless disbelief and a plaintive cry of "But what do you do now?" ... which was usually her response to having just been told what it was we did now.

Looking back at my increasingly desperate and angry private Tweets from Day Two, I find this:

"Please. F**k off before I have to kill you. Or myself. One of us has to go if you're going to keep this up."

Which pretty much sums up the experience: if gnawing off a limb to escape wasn't enough, and your only only way out was cutting your own head off using a pair of blunt nail scissors, you'd be begging for the opportunity.

Getting her set up with computer access also turned into another adventure in pain. To begin with it was just because it can take a while to get someone set up with all the appropriate email and network access they need.

"Who was that person who used to work here years ago, but isn't around anymore? They'd know what to do!"

Because apparently what they'd do is wave their magic wand and cause the electrons carrying La Mondaine's login details to propagate at faster-than-light speeds across all our systems, and Physics be damned.

Then we had to get her access to our primary database. I really wish we didn't. The things she's likely to do to it are the kind of things that made Skynet go bad, and while out our database might lack the capacity to start a nuclear war (as far as we know), it does have the ability to wipe all our software license records and recovering from that will make snacking on tumour-ridden mutant rats in a post-nuclear wasteland look like a picnic (albeit a picnic of two-headed, eight-eyed cancer rats). But I digress.

While one of the techs came around to configure the database client for her, she began wanting to know where the instructions were for setting up the old database. The old old database. She was here when the current incarnation was being phased in, was shown that we use a more highly-developed version of the same, and so should know the old one just doesn't exist anymore. Nevertheless, the tech clearly couldn't do his job without instructions that were nearly a decade old and unrelated to anything he'd seen in his time here.

La Mondaine disappeared into our storage room for several minutes and, somehow, emerged with a printed copy of the old instructions. Quite how she managed that ... well, bluntly, I'm f**ked if I know. I'm almost prepared to believe she brought them in from home with her but, more likely, Ted had a copy secreted away someplace in the hope that some day we'd return to the good old days.

She then tried to get access to a service desk tool that the organisation stopped using a few years before she left. More breathless surprise: "But what do you do now?" By now, even the Stress Fiend was starting to sound a little ragged. She showed La Mondaine the current service desk tool (only eight versions behind the current version and counting!) but emphasised that La Mondaine wouldn't be expected to deal with anything in there.

"But what if-"

"No. You won't need to."

"But we used to - with the old system, I used to - "

No. No, you don't touch that. Ever. I don't care what you used to do in the past, we don't work that way anymore. I will personally raze this building - this whole organisation - to the ground before I let you have access to any more systems than are strictly necessary.

So two days with La Mondaine filling in for Ted, and I think it's safe to say we've already lost all the gains in productivity - not to mention the lower stress levels - his absence has brought us.Next week the Stress Fiend hopes to turn her loose in our database, telling herself optimistically "She'll be fine once she gets all the old stuff out of her head."

And I agree with her. There's absolutely nothing there that a little trepanation wouldn't fix.

Housekeeping, grave-robbing and a bit of history.

So we're now several weeks into Ted's gentle cruise into retirement and (hopefully) out of my life. More on that eventually when I start to work through the backlog, but it hasn't actually been as bad as I'd feared.

It's worse. Oh, how it's worse.

A little over a year ago, The Invertebrate decided to let our one useful and competent team member go when their contract ran out. This was someone who could simultaneously perform both Ted's and the Stress Fiend's jobs to a higher standard than they could, and still have time to find ways to correct historical errors and fix broken processes; clearly, we just couldn't tolerate someone like that on our team especially when they did irresponsible things like recovering close to $100,000 in missing revenue.

I'm still in touch with them, and when I shared the happy news that Ted finally looked like he was moving on, they mentioned they'd be interested in some part-time work during that same period. On paper, it was a win/win situation: they get some work that suits the hours they're after, and we get someone who doesn't need to be trained from scratch, and we know we can rely on.

I broached the idea with The Invertebrate. He doesn't know about his nickname, but seems determined to defend it to the death and rejected the idea on the basis that:

• the Stress Fiend would feel threatened;
• the Stress Fiend won't give up any of the workload she can't handle, and won't relinquish control over any of it. Especially not to someone she knows will do it better;
• the Stress Fiend will be unhappy if we have someone who doesn't just see where things are broken, but actively works on coming up with and implementing solutions;
• the Stress Fiend doesn't want to work with someone more competent and capable of delivering all the changes she claims to be working on and would have had ready except someone else always finds a way to ruin things for her (curse those meddling kids!).

Instead, he's opted for Plan B: grave-robbing.

Okay, perhaps that's a little harsh. On the other hand, after the last couple of days dealing with La Mondaine, I don't feel it's entirely undeserved.

In the closing years of the last century, this organisation was a very different place. The team leader had a crazy and morale-destroying obsession with trivial details, true, but this was offset by an organisational culture that celebrated long social lunches, lunchtime drinks, crashing as many vendors' Christmas parties as possible, and so on (somewhat paradoxically, the OCD team leader led the charge on all these). It was a happier, chattier, boozier time when the boundaries between work and social life bled into one another.

Personally I'd have hated it, but I think it's fairly well-established by now that I don't socialise well with certain kinds of people. But this was the environment La Mondaine lived and breathed in her time here.

Then came The Dawn of The Ted. To La Mondaine, the arrival of Ted E. quickly turned into a struggle of Darwinian proportions, as they competed to see who could be the most obsessive about insignificant details, the most strident in demanding that every conceivable contingency be thoroughly analysed and documented ... and the most bloody inefficient at actually doing their job. La Mondaine was outclassed when it came to simple bloody-minded treachery and malfeasance, though, and eventually opted for early retirement rather than deal with Ted on a daily basis.

And yet... she couldn't bring herself to say good-bye to the poisoned social ties of the workplace. Soon she came back as one of the small horde of casuals the old team leader loved to have around, and the old battles began anew, just in time for me to start working here. The weekly team meetings with Ted, La Mondaine, the old Team Leader were nightmarishly epic three-hour affairs where the three would bicker and argue and "But what if...?" endlessly while the rest of our large and unwieldy team would break into small protective huddles to work on pet projects under cover of the storm.

(This, incidentally, is Ted's fondly-remembered Golden Age).

Eventually La Mondaine couldn't take anymore. Ted continued to outflank her by virtue of simple ambient toxicity, and after a series of increasingly explosive exchanges with the old Team Leader she resigned for a second time in a dramatic huff, and a couple of us were finally able to get on with cleaning up all the mistakes she'd made in the database.

Now, with the old Team Leader long gone and Ted ambling slowly off into the sunset, she's realised once again that she misses the social life here and that it's time to stage yet another come back.She's remained in touch with the Stress Fiend throughout, the Stress Fiend pointed her at The Invertebrate ... and the rest is history. The kind of history you'd like to see expunged from the books. The kind that makes you want to send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to perform some selective adjustments.

But more on that later. La Mondaine has returned, and within two days she's already made Ted appear ... not exactly as the lesser of two evils, but certainly the more subtle.

There's also a punchline to all of this. La Mondaine is only interested in working casually, part-time, and probably only short-term (especially as reality begins to sink in) and we still have no longer-term fix for our staffing problems.  The Invertebrate's solution is to find yet another casual that we'll need to train up from scratch, and then rotate them, La Mondaine and Ted E. through the week. If The Invertebrate deliberately set out to maximise the amount of confusion and inefficiency within the team, he couldn't have come up with a better plan.

The slow march to a better world

So ... Ted E.'s gentle glide into retirement, then.


The Invertebrate came back from his month's leave, still without a solution for dealing with Ted's switch to officially working part-time from next week. Eventually, though, he and our Associate Director put their heads together (or banged them together, if the outcome is anything to go by) to work out how best to fill the temporary half-time position.

The answer was so creatively retarded even I was surprised.

Our AD inherited a personal assistant, whose contract is up for renewal again. They've been here for around two years now, but in our organisation's finest tradition they've been strung along on a series of short-term contacts. The problem now is that there's not really enough work to fill a full-time PA role (alternatively the role just isn't being properly utilised to support other admin functions, but that doesn't appear to have been looked into).

The joint brainwave? Second someone to fill a full-time role that's half-PA/half-Ted. This is based on the presumed existence of a great untapped pool of people within the organisation who have the right combination of skills and a burning desire to take on two thankless half-time roles.  It also means the current PA will probably end up out of a job, as I doubt they'll meet whatever criteria are set for the role (on the other hand, they only have to be as competent as Ted and less personally toxic, and we'd be ahead of the game. Somehow I doubt this is an area they particularly want to work in, however). When Ted - hopefully - retires at the end of the year the hybrid person will then have the opportunity to step into Ted's shoes.

It's a novel solution.

It also poses a couple of problems. Well, rather a lot of them, really. Ted will be working set days a week*, and one of the things we need is someone to cover the days he's not here. The PA side of the role isn't that structured, though, and on the days when there are planning retreats, team leader meetings, workshops to organise or attend there's a good chance we'll just have no-one. Granted, having no-one is generally an improvement on having Ted, but it's not really sustainable on a long-term basis if the rest of us are actually expected to be able to go about our work or take leave.

I'm also fairly confident no thought's been given as to what happens if the hybrid decides they don't want to continue in Ted's footsteps. I know, I know: that's just crazy talk. After all, unless they've come from a particularly hellish, dead-end team, who wouldn't choose to return to their original team after six months being tugged between two quite different roles, extensively mistrained by Ted, and corrected by everyone else?

But this is all still theoretical, anyway. Nothing's been put in motion yet, so when Ted's part-time status kicks in next week there won't be anyone to cover those extra days. In a best-case scenario, filling the role by advertising internally is going take a minimum of four weeks assuming we accept whoever we get^; more likely we're looking at 6-8 weeks.

But wait! There's more!

A similar logic is at work in another team we work closely with, and where we pay the Pet Tech's salary so they can provide support for a number of things we need done. When Pet Tech v1 took up a more senior position in the same team, he was replaced with someone who didn't have the required skill-set, so Pet Tech v1 had to keep supporting his old role on top of his new duties.

This was not a resounding success.

Now Pet Tech v1 has left for another job entirely, most of the work he used to do is no longer covered at all. Not to worry, though, because management have come up with yet another plan that bypasses the need to advertise externally for qualified staff with the right skills. The Redneck Tech has been acting the acting team leader for the last few months, and was due to return to his normal role very soon.  Instead, he's being offered the senior tech role recently held by Pet Tech v1 ... except Redneck Tech doesn't have a programming background, either.

The solution?  My team will pay for training for both tech positions to develop the skills they should already have had when they were appointed to their roles.

Don't get me wrong. I like both Pet Tech v2 and Redneck Tech, and appreciate the quality of their work. Redneck Tech has been a good, responsive acting team leader, and Pet Tech v2 has, in many ways, been far better than his predecessor at getting the non-programming work done quickly and without fuss (and, more importantly, without descending into talk of shifting paradigms and the latest white paper draft).

This place has a strange and frustrating aversion to actually filling roles properly. There's a strange belief that it's somehow cheaper or more efficient to throw existing staff into new roles and hope the gaps in their skills can be covered before things fall apart. It's the same rationale behind The Invertebrate's appointment as team leader: give the job to someone missing most of the critical skills, belatedly realise something important is missing, and then appoint a second person to cover that gap.

---

* In a purely technical sense only. What he'll actually be doing is turning up to warm a chair between roaming the building to tell people how his semi-retirement's going. When he's not burning up his sick leave balance, that is.

^ Whoever, or whatever. Privately I expect the semi-human denizens of Accounts will use the opportunity to offload one of their under-performing minions on us. Again, though, this may still be a step up from Ted given how low the bar has been set.

No longer in Kansas, either figuratively or literally

Ted's on the phone to a client, having somehow blundered into a conversation where he's been asked for advice on how to install software. It happened when he tried pretending to know more than he actually does, and did such a convincing job that his attempts to brush the client off with repeated cries of "But I'm not technically minded!" just didn't work. Now he's trying a new strategy.

"There'll be a wizard. The wizard will know what to do. The wizard will tell you what steps to take!"

Welcome to Oz. That's the bastard child of the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion in the corner over there. He'll be with you shortly.

Words, words, words...

No, look. I'm sorry, Stress Fiend, but it's not actually enough for you to just use English words when you talk to me. You have to string them together into something approximating a sentence and, please, give them some context. Otherwise what you're doing is no more a form of communication than Tourette's syndrome.

Just another day...

The Stress Fiend is demonstrating yet again that she's constitutionally incapable of taking only one day off at a time. I'm fairly confident she'll be back tomorrow, though, because otherwise she needs to produce a medical certificate. On the other hand, The Invertebrate would need to insist on seeing it.

In the meantime, Ted E. is ... trying to create a graph in Excel? Dear god, why?

Actually, it's not hard to guess why. He wants to try to make a point about how much work he does - or how much work he believes someone else isn't doing - and has once again confused graphical reporting with magic. He'd have made such a happy caveman in some prehistoric, shamanic culture.

In the modern world, though, it's rather like watching a real-life pig attempting to build its house of bricks, where the pig keeps rolling in the cement to cool off, and then wonders why it's suddenly getting harder to move.

"Yes, we can; and no, we won't."

"This supplier we've been dealing with for ten years and have scores of emails from in our shared Inbox ... can you tell me their email address?"

It's a small question, but one of such awesomely staggering laziness and unadulterated time-wasting (he could have looked up the answer several times over in the time it took to walk across the room, deliver a pointless preamble  and then finally ask the question) that I'm still trying to decide if I should go for a walk or just beat the hell out of him on the spot.

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

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

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

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

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

A cyclical model of stupidity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Places you don't want to go

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

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

Or perhaps a sexual one.

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

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

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

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

Or the best sexual experience he's ever had.

I swear, I'm not making this up.

Nor am I even lightly embellishing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops

The Stress Fiend is discovering the hard way why we don't send small items worth $3,000 through unregistered mail just because the client annoys us.

It's hard to see how this one won't come back to bite us.

Ah, the suspense...

Ted E. returned from yet another week of leave on Monday. In a staggering coincidence, the Stress Fiend called in sick, appeared on Tuesday (when she knew I was going to be absent on a training course) and has been missing again for the two days since.

Cynicism levels are running high, and it's anyone's call whether she'll come in tomorrow: on the one hand, she's clearly on a roll and it's been a while since she had a good sick-leave binge; on the other, turning up on Friday and denying herself an extra-long weekend looks marginally less like malingering.

Hmm. It would also negate the need for a medical certificate, so that may tip the balance.

What I'm also half-expecting is that Ted will be "sick" tomorrow in protest.

Filing in tongues

An accounts person is looking at some of Ted E.'s work he's printed out and filed, and trying to work out his filing system.

"Why doesn't he file them alphabetically?"

"He does. He just doesn't use the same alphabet as the rest of us."

(Ted is away on holiday - again - this week).

Cynicism or experience?

I realised yesterday my cynicism about management in general is hitting a low point when a friend was discussing a win-win proposal they'd taken to their manager, his apparent willingness to consider it, and promise to get back to them with a decision later in the week.

I almost replied to them with this, but held back because their optimism will be crushed soon enough without needing any contribution from me:

Your manager is presented with two options: one is a carefully-considered proposal that's been run past the stakeholders, benefits everyone concerned and has no discernible downsides. The other is something they picked up in a bar last night from a crazy homeless man who throws diseased sewer rats at schoolchildren in his spare time.

Based on all the evidence to date, who do you really think management are more likely to listen to?

It's entirely possible, of course, that I'm projecting just a little...

Assuming the Mantle of Stupidity?

The Stress Fiend has just observed, a little peevishly, that doing things the sensible, logical and replicable way sometimes involves doing a little bit of extra work at the outset.

I'm hoping this doesn't mean she's preparing herself to assume Ted E.'s role of opposing things that make things easier in the long term.

The state of things

Right, then...

Things have been quiet of late for a few reasons, at least partly because there's often a fine line separating the depressingly tragic from the painfully amusing and things have been on the wrong side of that line a little too much lately. I also took some time off for a desperately-needed sanity break before The Invertebrate heads away for a month and leaves me in charge, which is more or less a nice way of seeing that he's leaving me to be ignored by the Stress Fiend and Ted E. for a while in his place.

This does not fill me with joy, but fortunately The Invertebrate finally recognises that the two of them are essentially unmanageable (or at least beyond his abilities to do anything with) and the standards I have to meet as Acting Invertebrate haven't been set particularly high.

The big news is that Ted has finally taken the plunge and announced his retirement plans, although it would probably be more accurate to say that he's dictated his plans to The Invertebrate, who's agreed to them without reservation as the fastest way of resolving the Ted problem without having to make any real decisions. In a few weeks Ted will be going part-time before finally (hopefully) leaving at the end of the year. There's no guarantee that he actually will, of course. He may well decide that retirement's not for him, at which point I fully expect the Stress Fiend to murder him on the spot, witnesses or no.

The Invertebrate has gone on leave without really working out what comes next. In principle, I think, we're supposed to have a part-time Ted-in-training through that six-month cruise to his retirement.  Or, possibly, his violent and premature death.

It's going to be a long year.

More own worst enemies, and own-goals

The Stress Fiend, as I've mentioned, has an unerring ability to not only make her own job harder, but that of everyone else that comes into contact with her. I haven't done one of these for a very long time, so here's a pop quiz.

You're a technical support person, whose job it is to install software on a client's computer. To do this, you need  the following basic information:

• who is the client;
• what software are they allowed to have; and
• what serial numbers do they need to activate the software?

Keeping that in mind, which way of presenting the information is more useful to you? Grouping it by:

1. software title and version;
   or
2. an internal reference number generated by an in-house system to which you don't have access?

Now, the thing is that the way the Stress Fiend has organised this information (and I'm going to let you work out which option she's chosen) isn't even useful or convenient to us, so it's not like she's even just being too lazy to or disorganised to make it accessible to others: she's actively chosen to organise it in a way that's of no benefit to anyone at all.

Ted's touched on this before (not because he has any opinion about the way the information should be presented for the tech staff, but because he feels we shouldn't be doing it at all, although he's yet to suggest how they're supposed to get the information they need) and the Stress Fiend's argument at the time was that it allowed for "better control". I don't know of what, though. We already have that data organised in a more useful and accessible form in our primary database for our use, and the tech staff don't have write-access to be able to tinker with the information we make available to them, so ... I don't know. Really, I don't. It's one of those leaps of logic (or stress-induced psychosis) that I'm just not capable of following and really don't want to follow.

**********

And while we're on the subject of demented workmates, as opposed to the merely incompetent or psychopathic, she's managed to score another own-goal despite her absence for the last three days at a training course. Or, at least, that's where we thought she was. The trainer called this afternoon to tell The Invertebrate that the Stress Fiend has missed the last day of the course (along with the exam on its content), still has most of the training material with her, and how would The Invertebrate like to proceed?

The Invertebrate visibly rocked back in his chair, and is now wondering if and when the Stress Fiend ever planned to tell him she'd missed a day of the course at all.

Her own worst enemy

I'm sure I've mentioned before that the Stress Fiend is her own worst enemy. I know she likes to imagine that role is already taken by Ted E. and our clients, but when it comes to making her own life harder there's really no-one who can hold a candle to her.

For instance, after the conversation she just had with The Invertebrate, I'm now wondering just how long it will take for her loud and unambiguous reference to Ted as "numbnuts" in Ted's hearing to come back and bite her.

On writing notes, and knowing when not to ask questions

The Invertebrate tries to slip away quietly for lunch, but makes the mistake of saying so aloud.

"Oh," says Ted, looking up from where he's busy scribbling away at something, "I was writing you a note."

(Notes are Ted's latest way of trying to pass a problem on to someone else without giving them the opportunity to pass it back to them. He waits until their back is turned, slips it on to their desk and then runs away. If they don't notice, he'll mention it as he slinks out the door in the afternoon. His notes appear without any kind of context or explanation, so I routinely ignore them. The Invertebrate is still a bit further back on the learning curve.)

The Invertebrate pauses. "What was it about?"

Ted realises the by telling someone he's writing them a note, he's just undermined his own strategy.

"Oh. Oh, nothing. You go to lunch. It can wait."

The Invertebrate persists. "It's okay, I'm not gonna starve. Shoot."

"Um, I'm still finishing the note."

"You don't need to write a note. Just tell me."

"I'll tell you while I write." 

The Invertebrate soon wishes he was starving to death, because it has to be preferable to what follows.

Even under optimal conditions Ted's writing is slow and incoherent. Worse, he's even less capable of multi-tasking than most people: he can't talk any faster than he writes and, if he tries to utter aloud, any word other than the one he's in the process of writing, his brain breaks and he has to pause and start again.

After many stops and starts (punctuated by increasingly indignant growls from The Invertebrate's stomach) Ted's note boils down to this: one client has placed the same request seven times over the last working day.  Ted doesn't understand why. Rather than ring the client to see what they're doing, he wants The Invertebrate to do it for him.

The Invertebrate, broken by the ordeal, agrees to do so and staggers off to lunch. Surprisingly, he actually comes back afterward.

Not our usual vendor spam

I think our spam filters must have fallen over during the night, because in amongst all the legitimate email (which, honestly, is a misleading way of looking at it given how little meaningful content there is in any of it) there are a couple of gems of internet marketing.

Really, who wouldn't be persuaded by the offerings like "Love Tsunami!", "Forces donger to go up" (although, on reflection, that seems like it might be potentially painful for all concerned) and "Bulldozer lovepower" (even if that last one sounds like something a Japanese cartoon character would should during a fight scene)?

Amusing as these are, though, I just wish Ted would stop using the group email address to log into adult websites.

Glimmerings of sentience

"Can you have a look at this email template I've drafted?" *

(Translation: "Even I can see I don't know what I'm talking about here. Please don't let me put my name to this.")

---

* "Drafted" in this case means "Cut-and-pasted together from the previous year's email he's trying to emulate, without actually knowing what any of it was about or trying to update the information, and with no attempt to correct the crazy format changes wrought by the combination of Ted and Lotus Notes", so obviously I'm using the term pretty loosely. Ted, I suspect, isn't.

Pushing the envelope

I think Ted may have genuinely broken new ground this morning. One of the admin staff asked Ted if we had a shredder they could use. He obligingly showed her where it is, before deliving the following disclaimer:

"But I don't really understand how it works. I think it might need electricity or something, so it might need to be switched on first. I don't know."

Even in a jellyfish, this would clearly be self-parody. With Ted, though ... 

Welcome to Monday

Whoever implemented our HR system here was clearly touched by genius ... in the sense that a genius armed with a sack of pig iron bludgeoned them about the head when they saw what was proposed, before hurling themselves through a third-floor window to escape the madness.

It makes me wonder if Ted E. is moonlighting as an HR sysadmin.

*****

Can you spot the difference?

What Ted says: "Oh, we're not bothering about being compliant with that anymore."

What Ted means: "We have blanket coverage for that software and don't need to track individual installations anymore."

I'm actually a little disappointed he said that to one of the techs and not a supplier, though. That could have been amusing.

Turning into one of those days

The Stress Fiend celebrates another week of her return to full-time work by not coming in again. I think she might have managed one full week since the start of the year but don't quote me on that.

---

Fortunately we still have Ted here to fill the breach. Unfortunately it's only in the Henry V "close the wall up with our English dead!" way.

"Invertebrate, I've got a voicemail message here you might want to have a look at." (Yes, I know).

"Did you want to transfer it through to my phone, then?" (He knows that otherwise Ted will just - eventually - repeat it to him, full of errors)  "No, wait! What's it about?"

Too late. Ted happily transfers the call.  About two mintues after that he finally answers: "I just thought it was a weird one, and you might like to have a listen to see how you want to handle it."

The Invertebrate duly checks his voicemail. "The one that just asks can we give him a call back in an hour, but doesn't say who they are or what their number is? That one?"

Ted is either blissfully unaware of the underlying echoes of disbelief in the Invertebrate's voice or, more likely, assumes it's disbelief at the message, rather than the fact Ted just wasted several minutes of his time while he's dealing with a political bunfight that's erupted in the last fortnight and shows no signs of abating soon.

"Yes, yes... That's the one. Some people just know how to waste our time, don't they?"

Ted E. does not compute.

Ted's still struggling with the idea that a local support-oriented database isn't the same as the HR database that underpins most of the organisation. Kicking things off, he starts tormenting our long-suffering database developer for answers, and they've reminded him yet again they don't work in that area, can't tell him why it behaves in certain ways, and that he needs to direct those kind of questions towards the team that manage that system. I think the number of times he's been told this is now well into triple figures.

The Invertebrate's turn comes next: "I need an explanation for this."

The Invertebrate tries futiley to give the same explanation he's given Ted a couple of dozen times before (here, for instance) but quickly, if unsurprisingly, hits the infamous Ted E. brick wall.

"Wait, wait. Sorry, Ted, you've lost me. How does what you're showing me now relate to the problem you're having?"

"Oh, it doesn't. This is something else."

The Invertebrate limps away from the conversation after, in effect, telling Ted to try using his brain a little.

Ted decides that's a fool's game, and finally rings the team he should have called months ago for some answers about this. Luck or foresight were on their side, however (alternatively, and equally plausibly, they may have been trying frantically to stave off a system crash), and he had to content himself with leaving a petulant message.

I'm not optimistic they'll call him back, though. Any call that whines "I want to know how this works", without actually stating whether there's any reason other than idle curiosity tends to settle at the bottom of the call-back list.

Sometimes it's too easy

For a variety of reasons we don't support Windows Vista here. In hindsight this seems like an especially obvious decision to make but, in reality, it owes more to extended procrastination by senior management afraid to make a decision one way or the other.

In Ted's world, this means that Vista doesn't exist. (I imagine there a lot of people who'd like to live in that world, too, but they should bear in in mind they'd be sharing it with Ted). So when a relatively important client calls with problems with a software installation on their home computer, and the increasingly desperate support person calls my area looking for advice, Ted manages to combine a little bit of knowledge (overhearing me mention some Vista users were having trouble with this particular piece of software) with ontological anxiety when, first, he tells the support tech that "Oh, they must be using Vista!" and then realises he's entered paradox country and starts to babble down the phone.

"Oh, wait. There isn't any Vista. They can't be running it, because no-one has it. But if no-one has it, how can people be having problems with it? Uhhh... I'm going to transfer you to someone else now."

From the "I know it shouldn't surprise me, but..." file

Ted E. has a really unique way of looking at the world. Well, I'd like to think it's unique but it almost certainly isn't. However he's the only person I know who does this.

We're under some political pressure at the moment to justify the way we operate. This has come about because the way we work was dictated to us by senior management several years ago and we haven't been allowed to deviate from it since. In the lastyear or so, though, virtually every level of management from this unit's team leader up to the director and his boss has resigned or moved on, and now no-one knows why we're forced to work this way. But they still won't let us change, or provide us with the resources we need to operate differently.

The Invertebrate has been asked to prepare a brief, large-print explanation of what we do, how we do it, and why we do it the way we do. What we really need for this is to dig through The Morass and find documentation from the upper echelons explaining this.

Ted, on the other hand, has decided that what we need are the semi-literate* email templates he sends to suppliers saying, in effect, "We buy stuff for this organisation, and we're special, so you should give us cheap prices", because they'll demonstrate to the higer powers that we operate this way because that's the way.

The Invertebrate makes a foolish attempt to explain that what he needs is something official from our management showing the rules their predecessors have laid down.

"But this is official. We send this to suppliers. Look, I even have a shortcut that will past it into an email automatically."**

"We write it, and it's automated. It doesn't get much more official than that!"  [paraphrasing]

The Invertebrate has had a rough couple of weeks and folds quickly. "Err, yeah, Ted. Thanks for that."

Ted all but wags his tail and goes back to drinking out of the toilet.

---

* I think they manage to be semi-literate by virture of being based on an original written several years ago by someone else, which Ted E. has been attempting to plagiarise ever since.

** This isn't a bit of technical cleverness on Ted's part. It's the result of some crap little piece of software that the unit tried to use in lieu of actually documenting how things needed to be done or using actual template stationery. Ted's the only one still using it, because it ended up being so over-used that no-one knows the two thousand different keyboard combinations needed to insert the right text (and because a combination like Shift-S causes it to embed a chunk of irrelevant text right into the middle of whatever you're typing. Ted doesn't use punctuation or capitalisation at all, so this problem never affects him), and no-one ever documented what the various combinations are.

Instant nastiness

"I'm not a technical person," says the creature who's only technically a person.

Who supports the support staff?

Oh, it looks like he's decided to cram in as much as he can before he goes. A passing phone-support tech was on a desperate run for coffee when Ted stopped just short of physically dragging him to the phone to help one of our clients that Ted (unsurprisingly) was struggling with.

"My coffee break!" gasps the increasingly desperate tech when he finally manages to escape the phone call, "It's almost over! You're killing me, man!"

He makes a break for the door.

"Wait up," calls Ted, "I'll come with you." And vanishes yet again.

Unconfirmed rumours

The Stress Fiend (who has yet to manage a full working week since returning to full-time duties and is already claiming mounting levels of stress) tells me that Ted E. will be going part-time from the middle of the year (will anyone notice?) and then retiring at the end of they year.

Around ten minutes after this, Ted trundles in over an hour after his advertised starting time without a word, turns his computer on, and goes wandering off someplace for over half an hour.

I don't want to get my hopes up until I hear something a bit more definite or authoritative, but there have been a growing number of hints that something like this might be coming.

Of course if it does happen I'll be at a bit of a loss for material to write about, but I'm sure my organisation can solve that by poaching the idiot from some other village.

Idiot Season has started early this year, I see.

Some clients have a singular talent for asking the most staggeringly inane questions that leave you wanting to do nothing more than beat them about the head with a sack of bricks.

"Why is the information you sent me in this email different from the information you sent me in the previous one?"

Because, you misbegotten wretch, you told us the information in the previous one didn't seem to be correct. We checked into it, found that was the case, and sent you the correct details.  And if that still wasn't enough of a clue as to why they were different, the explanation at the start of the second email should have been a hint.

A normal person might be content to attain that level of stupidity or, at least, rest on their laurels for a few hours. Not this individual, however. He then follows it up with a phone call minutes later to repeat the question, trapping Ted E. on the phone for many long minutes (demonstrating again that it's an ill wind that blows no good), before being passed through to me with another riddle for the ages.

"This email I've received about these external training courses... there are prices listed next to them. Does that mean they cost money?"

Yes. Yes, it does.

"So that means they're not free, then?"

Advertised starting times are approximate only

Ted always likes to maintain that he starts at 8am or earlier every day. It's part of his justification for leaving early on Fridays, and one of the excuses he uses for accumulating ludicrous amounts of flex time considering how much work he actually does during those hours of seat warming.

I know from when I was acting as team leader that he lies on his timesheets, because I could see the hours he was claiming and I was getting reliable reports from others as to what time he was actually turning up in the morning. And, of course, there were the surly glares I received anytime he arrived and found me already at my desk. That was probably the last time he had to at least be at his desk during the hours he claimed.

I arrived early this morning to beat the heat. No Ted. No surprise either, really.

Half an hour after his advertised starting time he finally wanders in, and then promptely disappears for another fifteen minutes to collect a coffee and exchange gossip. Then he calls up the traffic section to report another employee for putting rubbish in a garbage bin. "No, no. I asked them and they said they'd brought it in from home."

He stopped to ask someone where they got their rubbish from. Following a previous conversation where it emerged he stared into his neighbours' houses at night, this surprised me much less than it once might have done.

"Yes, I took their licence plate number down."

Presumably he'll claim the defense of our garbage bins on his timesheet. In fairness, though, it's probably the closest he's come in some time to legitimately doing something for the organisation.

"She brought it in from home, can you believe?" repeats the person who once tried to bring his old computer in from home to dispose of it here because it had a virus.

It would be comforting to dismiss him as a freak of nature, but these days I'm not so sure he is.

Something dimwitted this way comes.

Ted has returned from his month-long holiday and isn't wasting any time. Figuratively speaking, that is:

• Despite being having just come back from holiday, he's already angling for an extra long weekend (a plan that was swiftly sunk when I staked my claim to the day he was eyeing up. Honestly, I was already aiming for that day before he even started checking the calendar for his next day off. Even money says he calls in sick that day now, instead);
  
  
• a client rings up with a problem that they've been having trouble getting someone to look at. It's within Ted's area of responsopility, the fix is easy ... but rather than actually doing anything about it (even with The Invertebrate telling him "It doesn't matter, just fix them up") he begins stalking the area, piece of scrap paper in hand, questioning everyone as to whether they're the ones who left this for him to sort out;
  
  
• another client rings up for some information. Ted pulls out one of his traditional spiels and redirects them to our website (presumably one of the parts he hasn't been in sabotaging) where "you'll be able to read a little story about that". Ted doesn't believe in things as modern as blurbs or information. Everything that relays information in writing is a story to him. Which, really, says some pretty fundamental things about his ambiguous relationship with things like "facts", "truth" and "honesty";
  
  
• offering to take The Invertebrate to coffee to pump him for information on what's been going on while he's been away. The Invertebrate looked hopeful for a second, misinterpreting Ted's Pidgin English invitation as meaning that Ted had some important news for him (you could practically see the "Yippee! He's going to tell me he's retiring!" thought bubble appear over his head until he actually realised what had been said;
  
  
• "Have my duties changed while I was away?" No, Ted, you're still expected to do at least a token amount of work while you're here. You don't get out of them that easily.

Sadly, it's like he never went away. He's now busy combing through everything that everyone else did while he was away looking for things to complain about.

New Year, old tricks.

Today was supposed to be the Stress Fiend's first full week back at work since her breakdown and reduced hours last year.

She's phoned in sick.

Stupidity striving for equilibrium

I don't know what strikes me as more stupid:

• Ted E. sending a series of emails to the same tech asking exactly the same question about several different computers, rather than simply compiling and emailing a list; or
  
• the same tech, without a trace of irony or self-consciousness, sending exactly the same reply to each individual email from Ted.

On the bright side, Ted's now departed for a month's holiday. Finally. He managed to draw it out by doing a grand tour of the office to say good-bye to everyone and tell them the exact date of his return. I'm not sure why, although the smart money is on equal parts stupidity and delusions of grandeur.

Words to strike fear

Without warning, Ted turns to The Invertebrate: "Randy for you, Invertebrate."

There's the office equivalent of crickets and tumbleweed.  Then everyone's brains try to climb out their ears to either flee in horror or roll around the floor in helpless laughter.

Ted, oblivious, waves a telephone handset at The Invertebrate. "It's Randy. From Microsoft*. He wants to talk to you."

Another exercise in communication falls victim to Ted's gift for making context-free statements.

---

*No, really. I'm not making this up. After the phone call was finished, Randy from Microsoft was subjected to much (probably) undeserved mockery.

The struggle of being Ted.

Ted approaches. "I'm taking off early. I've been struggling all day."

Because remembering to breathe in and out can be draining like that.

The Invertebrate comes back from a meeting and notices that there are even fewer people here than usual.

"Where's Ted? Gone already?"

"Yeah.  He said he was "struggling"."

"Struggling? With what? His work? Thinking?"

"I don't know. I wasn't game to ask."

The burden of being Ted

The Stress Fiend is off yet again (she's nominally working three-day weeks at the moment, struggles to manage even that consistently, but refuses to admit that there's a problem) and Ted's treating that and everything else as a personal affront.

He's sulking at the moment after trying to pass a couple of clients off to someone else to deal with, only to have them insist he actually direct them to the right section instead of just forwarding the calls through to the first technically-minded person he has line-of-sight on.

Many great, world-weary sighs ensue.

He's also working hard at feigning ignorance today*, but has already overplayed his hand badly.

The Invertebrate: "That kind of thing needs to go to the tech support guys."

Ted: "Who are the tech support guys?"

The Invertebrate waves his hand absently over the cubicle wall towards the desktop support team who've sat adjoining our area for at least the last five years. "Those guys, Ted. Those guys."

---

* I know, I know. This doesn't seem like something he should have to work at, but he's not content with just lying and saying "I don't know" and always over-reaches and tries to convince people that not only does he not know, he's never known, and has never been given any reason to think that this is something he could reasonably be expected to know or find out about any time in the several years he's been here. It's probably the only aspect of his job where he's actually set the bar too high for himself.

Reaching for the sky

No Ted today, which is always a good thing. I don't even care especially whether he'd legitimately sick or simply malingering because he's being worn out by having to work three or four hours a day.

Then The Invertebrate arrived this morning and checked his voicemail when he noticed Ted was missing. Wearing a look of surprised disbelief (otherwise known as the "wtf?" expression),  he repeats Ted's message:

"I woke up this morning with sore eyes, so I won't be coming in today. If you don't mind."

I'm not sure if dissolving into laughter was the correct response, but it seemed the only suitable one.

Own worst enemies

Looking at some of the operational documents the Stress Fiend has been creating ... she doesn't so much  make a rod to beat herself with, as express courier a personal invitation and baseball bat to every sadist within a hundred mile radius.

Glimmerings of sentience?

Ted's asked me to read an email he sent to a client yesterday to see if I'm happy with it. Understandably this set alarm bells ringing, not least because he's never given a damn about my opinion on anything before now.

It actually manages to be worse than I suspected.

It's a mixture of a hand-washing confession of ignorance and simultaneous attempt to provide answers based on a loose keyword search in Google (have I mentioned before that he doesn't know how to actually use Google or, indeed, any kind of search tool?), culminating in a half-hearted plea for more information.

Each part by itself isn't that bad.  It's not great, either, and is written in Ted's unique brand of Pidgin English, the very existence of which is an achievement in itself as English is nominally his first - and only - language. But I certainly don't have a problem with telling clients we don't know the answer and need some more information from them before we can proceed. I wish he'd do it more often instead of making stuff up and then leaving it to someone else to clean up the mess.

Okay, perhaps I was being overly charitable: the middle part, the random web search for things he thinks might be useful to the client?

It's heroically bad. It's on par with the algorithm Amazon use for their recommendations ("We see you bought a copy of the graphic novel From Hell. Would you like a pair of Wolverine underpants to go with that?"), but even that doesn't convey the scale of how truly bad it is.

Which is: it's so bad that even Ted suspects he's not making any sense.

"I like to watch..."

Ted E.'s on an energy-efficiency kick, courtesy of a council brochure dropped into his letterbox offering to do an energy-efficiency check of his house.

"My neighbours are so wasteful with their lights. Every time I look into their place at night they've got all the lights on, in all the rooms. Front rooms, back rooms, everywhere."

I'll just leave you to think about that statement for a moment.  It doesn't get any less creepy.

Sometimes this place makes me laugh

Redneck Tech: "I'm getting a dog. A rottweiler."

Invertebrate: "You're nuts."

"Why?"

"Because you've got small kids, and Rottweilers like eating people."

"Any animal can be a danger to small kids. You just have to train them properly."

"They eat adults, too."

"I know! Isn't that cool?"

"What are you going to do if it turns on you or the kids?"

"I've got plenty of guns. It won't be a problem."  Pause.  "And it's not like it would be the first time, anyway."

I weep, for the day is still young

Oh, for...  Everything below happened within the first 45 minutes of me arriving at the office.

*****

Ted's just discovered something that's been a basic part of one our primary systems for the last two and a half years. So it's a long way from being a new or even recent feature, and it's been a prominent part of our client-side website since the outset ... yet somehow he's managed to never see it before. He's now warbling on about how nice it looks, and how wonderful it is we're able to do such great things.

"Great things" in this case simply being the provision and correct formatting of information on our website. What he only dimly grasps is that this only happens when I become aware that someone's posted semi-unintelligble rubbish on our site and go in to clean it up. I suppose I should be pleased at the unintended compliment, but I'd rather he and the Stress Fiend just did it properly in the first place.

*****

Only minutes after that, he announces he's decided unilaterally to give out client details to people too cheap to actually pay for their own stuff. That way the tightwads can ring our clients directly and try to harass them into giving up their software. This fits comfortably within his definition of excellent client service, and saving the organisation money.

Oh, god. The Invertebrate thinks that letting random people harass our clients rather than manageing the task ourselves (which, you know, is part of what we're supposed to be doing here) is a good idea.

*****

"Did you book me in for a training course?"

It turns out that he's just received a request for feedback for a training course he was apparently supposed to attend last week.  Investigation turns out that Ted had, in fact, registered himself for it.

"But how was I supposed to know when it was on?"

More investigation reveals that the course is recorded in his calendar. Where he entered it. After receiving the invitation from the people running the half-day course.

"Oh, I never look at my calendar. They should have reminded me."

Presumably because he hasn't actually worked out how to set a reminder in the calendar he doesn't use.

The Invertebrate tells him to register for the next course.

"But I don't really want to do it."

"But I want you to do it."  (This is close as The Invertebrate gets to ever reminding Ted who's actually - nominally - in charge here.)

The course? Customer Service Skills.

Who edits the editor?

Damn The Invertebrate for telling Ted E. it was possible to edit html files in Word.

I know he only did it to stop Ted hyper-ventilating the first time he opened an html editor, but going in afterward to clean up the resulting mess is time-consuming and tiresome given that Ted's editorial skills are at a level where if there was a way for him to glue coloured string and macaroni to an electronic document, he'd be doing it.

Hysterical Revisionism

No, you idiot. When I tell you that someone didn't speak to me about something, that means they didn't speak to me about something. Just because you saw me talking to them three days ago doesn't mean I was talking to them about the one thing that's rattling around in your empty skull at the moment.

Printing off a piece of paper about the thing you think I must have been talking out and waving it at me as documentary evidence will not magically rewrite the past and cause me to suddenly admit that yes, that's exactly what happened and I've just been lying about it all along.

Etiquette

The Pet Tech is congratulating himself and his team on having successfully resolved something that's been a bugbear for nearly a year now, loudly expressing his amazement at the organisation's lack of communication skills and impressing upon everyone that if his team had known about this problem from the start much unnecessary work could have been avoided.

He's not being particularly obnoxious about it (yet), but this does raise an interesting point of etiquette. Is it considered more polite to:

• appear needlessly quarrelsome now by reminding him that that he and his team were aware of the problem, involved in meetings to deal with it, and advised of the workaround that's been in place for a year; or,
• let him keep going until he does get obnoxious about it, and then forward him the email chain showing he'd been told about it ages ago, particpated in meetings in how best to work around the problem, and then did nothing?

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.