The spirit of cooperation

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

My bosses from the new department to a mailing list:

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

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

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

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

"WTF?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cow-orker: delayed response

Yesterday

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

Today

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

With friends like, er, me...

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

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

Maybe he thinks I was exaggerating.

Muah hah hah...

Cow-orker: Actually slightly worrying

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

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

---

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

Cow-orker: taking the Manson Defense

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

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

Cow-orker: To Boldly Go...

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

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

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

Cow-orker: Let Sleeping Wildebeest Lie

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

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

Hahahahaha...

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

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

Cow-orker: The Truth Is Out There

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

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

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

Yee-hah.

Cow-orker: miscellany

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

"Actually you did."

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

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

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

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

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

Cow-orker: plotting & scheming?

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

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

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

Note the mooving, by the way.

Because we're special...

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

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

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

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

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

Cow-orker: please vote me off the island

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

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

Argh argh argh...

Cow-orker: Mathematics of fear

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

Cow-orker: Resistance is useless!

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing the blame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cow-orker: survival tips

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

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

Cow-orker: Silly Season continues

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

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

Cow-orker: "Gotta go!"