I don't know where to start

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

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

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

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

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 I think at some point he's proposing that we simply duplicate the Morass, including all the old and outdated documentation (99% of what's there, at a conservative estimate) ...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

Ted E. in time lapse

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Slappable Clients: the return

Submitted via a web form:

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

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

Tech support begins at home

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

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

 - click-click - 

"It still opens in the browser."

 - click-click - click-click - 

"No, right-click."

 - click-click - 

"I don't understand."

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

 - click-click - 

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

 - click-click - 

"Just click on it once."

 - click-click - 

"Once!"

 - click - 

"It's not doing anything."

 - click-click - 

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

"Did you use the right mouse button?"

"Yes!"

 - click -

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

"You wanted to edit the file, right?"

"Yes."

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

"I don't see it."

"..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Human spam

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Gollum

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

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

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

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

So easily offended...

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

Then I get inside and discover why.

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

Mr Helpful

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

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

Meanwhile, on Planet Ted...

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

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

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

I don't think so.

Mr Unreliability

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

The Friday Entertainment

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

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

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

He doesn't like that.

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

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

Not a bad day at all, really.

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

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

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

The sixty-year old spoiled child

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

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

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

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

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

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

But dignified withdrawals are apparently for lesser men.

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

Reflex action

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

Honestly, who'd be a team leader anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

Ted E. sulks. Very conspicuously.

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

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

Welcome to Schadenfreude, population: me

Muah-hah-hah.

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

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

Well I'm enjoying it, at least.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and the Surreal

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

Bad: it's here.

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

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

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

The BSAA's best friend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invertebrate procrastinated.

 

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

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

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

And screen-captured, naturally.

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