The pain of being civil.

Replying to Ted E.'s emails always makes me disproportionately cross, because when responding to his poorly written bouts of badly-concealed petulance (we're not paying you what you're worth? Well aren't you the lucky one!) it's probably bad form for me as Team Leader to simply tell him to grow up and stop being a f****wit.

He has a remarkable talent for being able to undermine any valid points he makes by a) assuming that it's all about him, and b) drowning them in childishness.

"... it's the only way to be sure."

Oh dear. Ted E. wants to have a weekly team meeting purely for the purposes of discussing emails that have or haven't been answered, and to discuss email filing procedures.

If I kill him now, perhaps I can prevent the madness from spreading.

Unfiltered reality

I've lost my desensitisation to the Stress Fiend's work habits. Long exposure to the Cow-orker had largely inoculated me against the worst of the Stress Fiend's antics, but a new team member is finding them difficult to deal with and I've been forced to view the Stress Fiend without any sanity filters in place.

The horror.

The horror.

Getting in touch with his inner schoolteacher

Ted E. has left a printout, covered in the trademarked half-essay in red ink that he uses when he feels a pressing need to claim the moral high ground and establishes his credentials as The Only One Who Takes His Job Seriously*.

And it's not his automatic assumption that someone else must have made a mistake because he doesn't understand it which makes me want to beat him about the head.

It's not even the fact that he could have found the correct answer to fairly easily himself, or even that the Stress Fiend told him the answer but he wouldn't believe it. (Although, thinking about it, that does seem like a compelling reason for violence.)

No, it's the childish way he feels the urge to triple underline points he's particularly emphatic and equally mistaken about, and draw giant exclamation marks to highlight what he sees as the folly and incompetence of his workmates.

Sadly, as team leader, I'm not even able to respond to him in kind because (as will be familiar to any oldest child reading this) "I'm older - or, technically, more senior - and should know better."

---

* Which, from a certain perspective, is indeed the case.

Calculated insult, or something more subtle?

That has to be deliberate - the Stress Fiend has just spent the last ten minutes exploding about uncooperative clients and unhelpful suppliers, so Ted E. decides this is clearly the perfect time to begin a slow, laborious, and somewhat patronising lecture (and, honestly, it's hard to imagine anything more offensive than being patronised by Ted E.) explaining how she's been missing something important in our job queue and that it's really quite simple if you know where to look.

This should be a recipe for the kind of homicide that would make Freddy Kreuger wake up at night screaming ... but something peculiar is happening.

The Stress Fiend actually seems to have calmed. Has her brain just shut down in self-defense, or does Ted E.'s droning monotone hit one of those strange frequencies believed to render people docile and compliant? Could there really be some method to his mendacity?

From the private archives: Why Ted E. must die

From earlier this year:

Okay. Over the last year the unit has been whittled down to four staff - three operational, one project/planning oriented. The last casual left a month ago because she got a better offer (i.e. it didn't involve working with Ted E.) and at the moment the Stress Fiend (one of the operational staff) is on leave, so it's just me and Ted. Except Ted flexed one day off last week, and called in sick yesterday. There are a lot of reasons I want to beat him about the head with a stout wooden chair at the moment (many of which can be distilled down to "Just because it's him"), but the one at the moment ... well, here's the chronology.

Last week

• Problem Client submits an order that, for some reason, fails to trigger the automatic system that should deploy his software.

This week - Tuesday

• Problem Client rings up to see what's happening with his order. In fact he rings up several times, and seems intent on filling up the voice mail;
• I speak to him to clarify a couple of things. He responds by sending more email to want to know how the clarification is going. I have to leave early that day, and I'm neck-deep in other things that are a higher priority so I don't reply;
• Ted E. can't resist sticking his nose in (multiple emails from the same problem client, no matter how small the issue, is his personal Armageddon Scenario - but only when he's confident he can make it someone else's problem or shortcoming), and a solution is arrived at. Surprisingly, he offers to put it in place;
  
• Ted E. is dropping broad and unsubtle hints that he intends to call in sick on Wednesday.

Wednesday

• Ted E. delivers;
• Problem Client leaves voice mail on Ted E.'s phone. Several times;
• I'm trying unsuccessfully to keep pace with three peoples' jobs, but have to content myself with keeping tabs on the incoming calls and monitoring the email for anything that can't wait until we actually have people here to do stuff;
• Problem Client sends more emails.

Thursday

• Ted E. returns, unfortunately having failed to die on his day off;
• Ted E. checks his voice mail. Ted E. calls the problem client and then spends the next several minutes telling the client "I can't understand why he [i.e. me] didn't take care of this for you. I was off sick yesterday, but he could have done it. I thought he was working on it. I don't know why he didn't do it, because I thought he would be taking care of it";
• this is all within my hearing - he's not even subtle about trying to pass the buck. He simply doesn't give a damn about whether he pisses off his workmates;
• then he forwards all Problem Client's voice mail - which is essentially the same message repeated over and over - to my voice mail inbox;
• and then he asks me "How is the problem client going?" to which I reply somewhat acidly "Well you were just talking to him, so you've got a better idea than I do".
  Either it goes over his head or, more likely, fails to penetrate a skull so dense that if they could reproduce it in labs, you could encase Chernobyl in it and safely build a maternity hospital on top;
• naturally he also lives in a state of happy oblivion about ever having offered to contribute to solving Problem Client's problem, and is happy to use yesterday's absence as an excuse to pass everything along to me. Because, presumably, I was meant to have taken care not only of all incoming work, but clear the backlog of outstanding tasks, too.

I'm not really given to hating people much, but if I was a casual hater Ted E. would be a Top 5 contender every time.

Slappable clients

The Stress Fiend is flummoxed. She dearly wants to savage a client, but finds herself at a loss for words (as well as getting prodded by some vague sense of self-preservation). The client's crime? Protesting that he can't possibly return some loaned equipment by yesterday:

"Hi! I just collected the [equipment] now. There is no way I can get it back to [you] by yesterday, 17 June!! I'll organise its return by courier to you tomorrow. Hopefully, you might get it back by Friday!? More likely, Monday!"

Next Monday, of course, being the 16th of June, which purists will recognise as the day traditionally held before the 17th, rather than nearly a week after. It's a small mistake, but it's one you'd expect someone to catch before firing off an indignant email.

(Meanwhile, the Stress Fiend rants for a good five minutes about how "It's ****ing idiot clients like these that waste my time and keep me from getting anything done!", successfully and entirely unknowingly fusing irony and factual accuracy.)

The forecast

I think Ted E., with his usual subtlety, has begun preparing for a sick day. It's the little clues that give it away, like muttering loudly to himself "Hmm, maybe I'll try a couple of panadol and see if that helps."

(I'm not being entirely cynical here - I've seen him do this before a couple of days in advance of having a day off).

Casting aspersions.

Ted E. makes his first serious bid to go over my head since I unofficially became the head of the unit a few weeks ago (literally everyone between me and middle management has retired or resigned since my last round of posts) by sending an email to middle management that's a call for action ... provided the action isn't his.

He's not actually pissed off at me this time, though. Rather, he's just using it as an opportunity to take random swipes at management, finger-pointing at my predecessor, have a general whine, complain that no-one listens to his complaint, and indulge in some bad grammar and spelling before a live audience.

He's special like that.

Well, that wasn't clever...

I just re-read a whole bunch of the old posts on here, and it's been a powerful demonstration of the mind's ability to blot out trauma. What sane person would keep subjecting themselves to this?

And, because he's on a roll:

There's an e-waste initiative happening at the moment (disposing of, that is, rather than generating - given my workplace, I feel that's a necessary distinction to make) and Ted E. has gotten wind of it. He rings up the coordinator and, cheerfully ignoring the parts of the notices that specify work equipment, kicks off the conversation with:

"Hi, I've got a Windows 98 computer at home. Can I bring it in and throw it out? It's got a virus."

(Note: I'm pretty confident he isn't referring to Windows 98)

Not content to rest on his laurels, however, he follows up - in all seriousness - with: "Or should I just put it into my recycle bin at home?"

Ted. E Logic

Longtime readers may recall that filing systems (and the absence or random application by drunken gibbons) are a particular bugbear of mine. Things are no different here, where the paper files are in relatively good order* but the electronic filing beggars belief, with about half of what we need to know stored in a dreadful morass on our shared server space. The previous manager (the one who went on long service a year ago never to return, and who's yet to be replaced) insisted on storing everything in perpetuity, so there's over a decade's worth of "historical" material there, amongst which current documentation and procedures wander like lost souls in limbo.

Lacking the resources and sheer drunken bravado (and hoping to cling to at least some shred of our collective will to live), a couple of us decided that rather than try to beat this monster into shape, we'd start afresh in a clean wiki, where things could be structured and tagged to make them actually useful once more. There's also a lot of stuff kept in people's heads (cheap polyester cushion stuffing in some cases) which we want to get into the wiki, too,

Anyway.

Ted E. has been haunting me since I got in this morning, searching for a process that he's sure must have been written down because he's sure he saw someone writing notes in a meeting where it was discussed several weeks ago: "I want to know this. Why didn't anyone write it down for me at the time? Why don't you remember it being discussed at the meeting you had that day you were away?"

Naturally it doesn't occur to Ted E. to write things down at meetings. His participation there tends to revolve around how management is letting him down, why we need written processes that he can then ignore, that he's tired of doing work that's above his salary level (functional literacy apparently falls into this category now) and how things were better in the olden days. He's been violently opposed to the idea of the wiki from the idea's inception, arguing that everything we need to know is in the Morass, if only someone on a higher pay level would devote their remaining life and sanity to cleaning up the electronic equivalent of Chernobyl.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh. "Perhaps" and "little" being the operative words.

Ted E. gets tired of waiting for someone to produce what he's looking for, but even he's now wary of trying to venture into the Morass for useful information. Desperation finally sends him to the wiki, where he finds the information he's after, demonstrating that despite his protestations of ignorance (and, believe me, they were more than plausible) he's actually capable of using it to find and retrieve information. Except ...

Now he's convinced that original version of the file is somewhere in the Morass, and has decided to go back and search for it there as a more trustworthy source. Presumably if he doesn't find it there, he'll it there just to avoid using the hated wiki again.

---

* So it's actually something of a shame they're largely unnecessary and duplicate information already stored in several other places.

A question I will not answer

A missive from upper management, kicking off a review of staffing and workspace requirements by asking team leaders* to identify the needs in their area. The attrition rate of staff in my area verges on the apocalyptic**, so we actually have more than enough available space for the tiny handful of us who remain. An embarrassing amount of space, in fact.

But I can't report this, because I know what the solution will be: rather than fill the vacancies (because clearly a team leader and a service manager aren't considered critical roles) the discrepancy in my area's staff/empty desk ratio will be resolved by removing our empty desks and giving the real estate to another section.

Some might say this is just cynicism speaking, but cynicism can be such an ugly word. I prefer to think of it as experience.

---

* Yes, I'm still in the unhappy role of team leader, overseeing the efforts of Ted E. and the Stress Fiend. Someday, upper management say, they may even pay me for this.

** And yet Ted E. remains, prompting fears that a post-Armageddon world will be inhabited solely by him and the cockroaches.

Go on, guess who...

That data corruption that Ted E. was so quick to shift the blame to me for? It emerged very quietly at a team meeting a couple of weeks later that someone hadn't quite grasped that when they were looking at tabular reports in a database, they were actually looking at live data ... and that blithely deleting the lines they weren't interested in, to make the report easier for them to read, might have unintended consequences.

Of course it also meant that Ted E. could then claim the reports had been fine-tuned, because they were no longer showing data he considered irrelevant.

Ted E. rides again

Oh, Ted E., you weasel ... there's been some database corruption and I can hear him, over in the corner talking to the database developer, telling her how "other people" (and he helpfully goes on to identify me specifically) use the database tables to search for and extract data that isn't accessible through the default reports are available (or, as he puts it, I "go in and change the design of the database").

"But I only ever use the reports you've given us, because I know that it's dangerous to look at the tables."

Yes, Ted E., data can be corrupted simply by looking at it. I'll be sure to keep that in mind the next time you ask me to find information for you that isn't available to you through the safe reports.

Fortunately, the database developer actually understands her work and, moreover, recognises when Ted E. is simply trying to pre-emptively pass blame on to someone else when it isn't even clear that there's anything to blame anyone for in the first place.

The horror... the horror

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised what my job here is. It's to fix up the things so broken and horrible that the people who actually have the information that would let them make sense of it all, don't want anything to do with it. Without, naturally, the benefit of knowing any of the things they know about the matter at hand...

It seems so obvious in hindsight, but it's taken three different tasks arriving at the same time to make me see it in that light.

From Russia, with Love?

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

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

Alena from Russia writes in "Surprise from Russia":

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

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

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

Alena can has chezburger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, in the attention-getting stakes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Something better. Something people can understand."

"About what?"

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

"Universally applicable but concise."

"Exactly. And unambiguous, too."

Uh-huh.

So far, so good...

... to quote the captain of the Titanic.

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

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

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

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

"Uh, is this thing on?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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