Exercise

Time for a walk - Ted E. is trying to be helpful, and I just want to kill him on principle.

Relative values

Dear god... a recent staff satisfaction survey across the larger area I'm a part of yielded such awful results that the powers that be are touring each individual team to discuss personally what things are making people unhappy.

Ted E.'s complaint that he plans to bring up?* That he's been here six years and isn't getting paid more for doing work that's more in line with the payscale below him than the one he's actually on.

And somehow I don't think he finds that objectionable for the same reasons I do...

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* Apart from me, of course. I don't think he's quite stupid enough to announce that ahead of time in front of me.

One of life's little mysteries

Why did we buy Ted E. a laptop again, anyway? I think this must have been one of those "vision" things, where the goal was to give Software Services extra mobility. But it's not like Ted E. is ever going to take a laptop home with him to put in a few extra hours, nor is it even likely that he's got any kind of work that even lends itself to that. Which only really leaves letting him roam to other campuses to meet other staff, and why in god's name would you want to let Ted E. out without adult supervision?

There's no reward for being healthy

On the way to work: text message from reliable, friendly team member telling me she won't be able to make it in.

On arrival: voicemail waiting from the Stress Fiend, telling me her partner is still dying and requires attention (after at least three days, surely they could at least hospitalise him???)

Ten minutes later: Ted E. rings in to say he's still sick and won't be in today. Laughs when he realises there's no-one else here.

A superstitious, cowardly lot.

I'm a team of one today. Further proof that it's not actually possible for me to be too cynical or pessimistic about my workplace.

One person is legitimately unwell and may well (against both our better judgments) struggle in later today - I deliberately didn't tell them about Ted E. and the Stress Fiend being off today); after having last Friday off, Ted E. spent much of yesterday foreshadowing being off today with a cold (in fairness, he was producing a lot of mucus yesterday, but it's so hard not to be cynical about his motives at the best of times); and the Stress Fiend is away a second day looking after her ill husband, who never seems to get sick in anything less than two-day increments. And again, a high degree of cynicism tends to creep into my views on the Stress Fiend's absence rates.

What's compounding my distrust of some of my teams motives is that Ted E. and the Stress Fiend were both supposed to sit down together yesterday and work through a process that one of them doesn't want to look after, and the other doesn't want to hand over.

Not exactly funny, but...

Team meeting, only the second since I officially became acting team leader ... and I think I scared Ted E. when he pushed his luck just that little bit too far by trying to slip a barefaced lie past me. The problem (for him) was that he sent two versions of the same email to different people in the team last week. The one he sent to his teammates irritated them enough; the one he sent to me and my manager ... well, let's not go into it.

But in the meeting today he tried to claim he'd never said one of the things he'd said in the email to me (versus what he'd said to the others). Which I knew was a lie - it was only the truth by the most generous of technicalities - and then he repeatedly tried to say he'd never said that.

What happened next wasn't a glorious moment for either of us but, on the bright side, it could have been a lot worse. I didn't break a chair over his head, for instance. After the third or fourth denial, I was on my feet heading for my computer where his email was still on screen: "Look, don't make me read out what you wrote. If you sent different emails to the rest of the group, that's your problem. But don't tell me you didn't write that!"

Ted E. finally seemed to realise he'd crossed a line (the look on his face was a pretty close approximation of a dinosaur looking at an oncoming asteroid and thinking"Hey, waitaminute..."), and suddenly stopped pressing his claim. He's been very agreeable and compliant since then, too, because that's probably the first time anyone in a team leader role has spoken to him like that. I think I may have scared the absolute hell out of him, so that's got to be worth something...

Professionalism is...

... not calling a f***wit a f***wit.

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."

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* 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.

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* 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.

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* 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.