Tag Archive for 'The Work'

Got Wood?

Published on April 30, 2010 in Work. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m abjectly tired of office work. It feels like a thankless never-ending cycle of drudgery for with little or no chance of personal fulfilment. This afternoon I’ve spent three and a half hours going through an ancient Microsoft Access 97 database manually changing a single field in hundreds of records from “Valid – To Be Charged” to “Valid – Closed”. Why was I doing it manually? Because nobody knows the password to open up the database in design mode so I can create a query to automate the process. Why don’t they know the password?

Simple: The guy who built it left in 2004 and never told anyone what it was.

In the past I’ve considered setting myself up in business building custom computers, but that seems to be a ten-a-penny business nowadays. The vast majority of people that want custom built PCS are also the kind of people that wouldn’t let anyone else interfere in the construction of the machine.

I’ve taken an odd notion recently about quitting my job and setting myself up as a craftsman of some kind. Logically it’s probably not a good idea as I don’t have any manual craft skills. I made a pencil case and a roasting fork  in Tech Studies at the school, but that was nearly twenty years ago.

Regardless of my lack of skills I do have a healthy dose of arrogant overconfidence in my own abilities, and a layman’s inclination to believe that, “that doesn’t look so hard.” Strangely I’ve been giving some cursory thought to the idea of quitting my day job and setting myself up as a purveyor of hand made furniture . I’ve had this sort of rustic idea of creating simple, utilitarian tables, chair and things out of decent quality wood and selling them on the internet.

Now practically speaking I don’t have the skills to make masterful pieces of furniture from scratch, and even if I could there’s no guarantee that people would buy them instead of some fifty quid mass produced effort from Ikea. In my dreams though, my idle daydreams that sustain me when the excel spreadsheets are sucking out my soul, I can be free to work at my own pace; creating wonderful things.

The Same Old Faces

Published on March 25, 2010 in Travel. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

I’ve posted before that I regularly walk to work and back, and that it’s a fairly long walk compared to what most normal people seem to do.  One of the more interesting things about travelling four miles on foot to get to work is that you get plenty of time to observe your surroundings. Things that flash by in the blink of an eye while you’re in a car suddenly become noticeable when the world is slowed down to walking pace.

One particular thing that amuses me is that I’ve begun to notice certain individuals that walk in the opposite direction. What’s more interesting than that is the fact I’ve begun to realise that I can judge how early or late I am by when, or if, I see them during my walk.

Now I’m sure, given the regimented ways of human employment, that there are many others I pass every day, but these particular individuals stand out for reasons.

Every morning, just after I leave the flat, I see a guy that I call Bike Gear Man. Bike gear man appears to be a fairly generic person who uses his bike to get to work. He hasn’t went all out and bought the latest carbon frame super-cycle, but he does have a fairly shiny hybrid bike and plenty of hi-vis equipment. You couldn’t miss him if you wanted to. What’s outstanding about him is the fact that he seems completely incapable of using the gears on his bike. He grinds along, pedalling for all his worth, and gets nowhere because he’s constantly got the bike in the lowest gear possible.

Next up is a guy that looks a bit like Worzel Gummage in a padded body warmer. I’m not entirely sure where he works, but he has a wild and unkempt look about him which makes him seem like an interesting character. His googly eyes put me off saying hello though. I’m scared he might chuck me off the Squinty Bridge.

Up from teh squinty bridge I regularly overtake a guy I like to call the Man Mountain. He’s an enormous gentleman who wheezes his way up towards PC World in Finnieston at a snails pace. He doesn’t seem to mind being overtaken though. He moves at a fairly constant pace so it’s easy for me to judge how late or early I am by how far up the road he’s managed to go.

Next I usually see the Sikh Joiner who cuts past me fairly quickly while loaded down with all of his carpentry tools. He seems like quite a nice old gent with a greying beard and orange turban. It’s odd to see a tradesman wandering about on foot and not in a battered transit, and even odder that he carries all his tools with him including a battered old hand made saw horse.

Next up is a female version of the Man Mountain who comes ambling down the road with an old, battered personal CD player in one hand and a ragged old jute bag in the other. She has to pause frequently to have a wee rest and is always wearing great fluffy earmuffs. She looks fairly scary to be honest.

The last person I always see is the Turbo Chinese Lady. I see her every day on the same stretch and she’s always jogging towards the city centre  in all weathers. I even saw her when I had to resort to the bus during the big winter freeze. That’s dedication for you.

The Break

Published on March 17, 2010 in Teh Madness and Work. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I can’t be entirely certain, but I think I suffered some kind of emotional or psychological breakdown in work today after being handed the umpteenth retarded flap-task. Afterwards it took me a few minutes to realise that something wasn’t quite right, and I think at think that was the veil of mental imbalance departing.

It seemed like a fairly ordinary morning. The boss was sweating it over the latest thing that her boss, and her bosses’ boss had gotten their expensive gold plated knickers in a twist over. It was something trivial and inconsequential, hell isn’t it always, but they had to have spreadsheets of data this instant.

I’m fairly sure it’s at that point my brain just shut down. Like I said, I didn’t notice personally, but one of my workmates brought it to my attention that I had just spent ten minutes staring at the computer screen, rigidly locked in the FPS player stance of left hand on the WASD keys and right hand on the mouse.I wasn’t doing anything, or saying anything. I was just sitting, staring blankly through the screen as though the world wasn’t there.

I hadn’t even noticed.

Incidentally I hate the mentality of many middle managers when it comes to coordinating staff and assigning tasks to them. In the example above I explicitly told them I didn’t have enough time to do their regularly scheduled flap-tasks/business activities and their latest flap-task-of-the-moment. The boss looked a bit blank for a minute, and I thought maybe she was going to reconsider. How wrong I was.

“I’ll need to authorise some overtime then to let you get them both done,” The Boss said.

“Well no, no you don’t, because I’m not doing overtime,” I said.

At this point I think her brain seized up. I could hear the cogs turning as she tried to fathom why I wouldn’t want to sit in the office for another three or four hours bashing out some asinine report that they’ll probably forget about. This growing presumption that employees should be so grateful that they have a job that they’re willing to work whenever and for as long as necessary as management require just at the mention of “overtime”  really gets my goat. It’s especially galling when it’s accompanied by an undercurrent of “you would do this if you were a team player.”

I’m sure I would…

The Black Hole

Published on February 10, 2010 in People Be Fools. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve discovered that a picture is worth a thousand words when dealing with some of my less than gifted colleagues at The Work. It amuses me when I end up drawing a diagram like this:

To explain to one of them why a chain email of “cats doing funny stuff LOL” didn’t reach anyone when he sent it. It seemed easier to just blame a giant black hole in the IT department than to continue fruitlessly trying to explain attachment size limitations, firewalls and how crap it is to get these emails when I can just look at the damn things on http://www.icanhascheezburger.com/. I was polite enough to avoid telling him that the two planets could just as easily be replaced with his ears…

The Great Tea Experiment

Published on February 8, 2010 in Health. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

El Kat has challenged me to change something, anything, in an effort to shake of my recent malaise. So, in a bout of insanity, I have decided to try to get through an entire day at the work without drinking any tea…

No doubt she meant for me to try something more fundamental, but I think it’s best to start small and work up.

08:00 - Just arrived after my big walk in and I’m still buzzing off the fresh air and exercise. So far so good.

08:32 - OK so far, but getting a bit stressed out due to the patented incompetence of some of my colleagues.

09:01 - I may give up drinking tea and take up STABBING….

09:35 - Drinking tea.

Resolve defeated by asshattery. Sigh.

Electronic Vagueness

Published on January 11, 2010 in Work. 1 Comment Tags: , .

What is it with middle managers and vague instructions delivered over email? Perhaps they’re scared that by being specific they’ll offend me in some manner?

GreyKodiak

Can you prpvide a list of those which caused the problems in December to both myself and the Humourless Harridan.

Captain Calamity

I left his abominable spelling and grammar intact.  Now I grant you that, at first glance, the instructions seem fairly specific, but I, and my team at work, deal with a lot of different stuff and it’s all prone to failures of one sort or another. Is he looking for information on our failures to adhere to the relevant legislation, or supplier failures, or even the number of times the toilet has been put out of order by the Phantom Turd Bomber. Maybe he’s not talking about work at all. Maybe he’s looking for information about the number of failed terrorist attacks on the news.

Instead of spending an entire day throwing random stuff together I did the sensible thing and emailed him back to to ask exactly what he was looking for:

Captain Calamity I’m not sure what information you’re looking for. Which problems do you mean exactly?

Naturally this must have caused some confusion as he then emailed me back with this:

The fsilures which we had in Dec who caused them and what was the reason.

Congratulations you old fool. You’ve just reworded your original email and managed to make it just as vague as it was the first time round.In an act of pointless defiance I’ve decided not to email him back as this circular discussion would probably go on all day. I’ve got a feeling I know what information he is looking for, but I’m still in the middle of producing it and it’ll probably be a few days before I’m finished.

The big problem with Captain Calamity, and indeed the vast majority of managers, is that he has no concept of the amount of time required to shepherd things through the convoluted processes that he devised while sitting staring into space. The paperwork is so bad now that each item on his requested list takes about half an hour to do, and there’s 90 or so currently outstanding. He’s got a meeting with his boss this afternoon so he no doubt assumes that I’ll pull the information out of my arse in time for him to take it along.

Unlikely.

I’m not even going to start on the lack of a “please” or “thank-you” in either email.

I’m also well aware of the irony of me complaining about the amount of time required to collate the required information while simultaneously sitting here posting on my blog.

OMG I Totally Like Broke IT

Published on December 17, 2009 in People Be Fools. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The Work seems to be suffering from a case of internet flakey-shakey-connection-itis lately, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that much of my job revolves around two web apps. Honestly though that’s not a problem either as it’s left me plenty of time to float about reading Armageddon by Max Hastings while getting paid for it. The Work’s front line IT has been outsourced to a call centre in Portugal which tends to remote desktop first and asks questions later. The end result is that the majority of people in the office can’t get onto the internet. The retards across the hall are in a serious flap because they can’t get on the Hello Magazine site, or check up the latest shoe prices on Ebay.

All in all this would be a fine winter’s day if it wasn’t for one, single solitary fly in the ointment, and that fly is the phrase “the internet is down”.

No, you cretins, the internet is not down. The internet does not go down. The express, designed purpose of the internet is NOT TO GO DOWN. The internet was designed to maintain interconnectivity in the face of a nuclear war it doesn’t choke because you’ve looked up too many pairs of Prada shoes.

Though I might.

Work Related Sitcom Idea

Published on December 5, 2009 in Screenwriting, TeeVee, Work and Writing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Recently I’ve had a weird idea for a sitcom bouncing around inside my head. It’s partly inspired by the Ricky Gervais show The Office, and also by the IT Crowd.  Oddly the main part of the inspiration comes from a flippant, throwaway comment that I made at work when I was asked where my managers was.

To put you in the picture, I have a team leader who disappears and reappears at will, and goes out of his way to do as little actual work as possible. He spends much of his time cruising around the country in his car, obstinately checking up on contractors, and smoking more of those hamlet style cigars than can possibly be healthy. I’ve actually sat in the car with him while he diverts calls with such random excuses as “I don’t like talking to that guy while I’m driving, or I don’t like that guy’s accent”. We don’t mind so much as he tends to let the team manage itself, and he only really gets involved with us to authorise holidays and fill out the online sickness forms. In all honesty there’s really there’s no need to even have him in the team other than to act as a buffer between us and the higher management.

I call him The Boy Blunder, but not to his face as he might cry.

Above The Boy Blunder we’ve got what’s euphemistically called a Team Manager. He’s the real brains of the outfit, and we’re convinced he’s some kind of Machiavellian genius.

I call him Pratman, but not to his face cause I’m scared he’ll like it.

We’re lucky if we see Pratman more than once a week. He goes to endless meetings that he seems to generate with some kind of random table straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons Handbook. He lives on buffets, hotel meals and formal dinners. I don’t even think he remembers what his wife looks like cause he’s on the road so much.

His every appearance is like the arrival of a pantomime villain as he crashes in, dispensing orders and demanding reports, actions and updates before cruising off for another week into the great unknown. He rarely remembers from visitation to visitation what he’s asked people to do, and it can be many months before he actually catches up with himself.

I know that this seems more like a rant about management at The Work than a post about a sitcom idea, but I wanted to set you up with some background to the idea.

The idea cam e about with a jokingly absurd idea that came to me after being asked for the sixth or seventh time in a row about where The Boy Blunder was that day. When I said, again, that I had no idea I was immediately asked the standard follow up question of “where’s Pratman then?” Naturally I had even less I dead where the hell he was, so I just shrugged and told them to keep phoning their mobiles till they got annoyed and answered.

So far, so standard.

It was then that I said to my colleagues, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Pratman was actually a super villian like Blofeld, or even Doctor Evil, and was out there somewhere plotting to conquer the world?” They agreed that this was a fairly absurd and humorous idea and I started to think about how it could be made into some kind of sitcom.

I have an image in my head of a group of average, everyday office workers sitting around doing paperwork, filling in spreadsheets and going about their dreary existence working for what appears to be a perfectly legitimate company. Then when one of them encounters a problem of some kind they phone up the kindly, but often absent boss, and the scene cuts to him doing something truly diabolical. It could be anything from robbing a bank, to feeding orphans to genetically modified alligators, but somehow he always manages to maintain the illusion that he’s just out at a conference or something. The humour of course would come partly from the juxtaposition of these two visions, but also from possibly the inclusion of a character that knows what the boss and the company is up to, but somehow can’t quite get his hands on the proof for a variety of comic reasons.

Sure it might not manage a whole series, and the idea might be a bit stretched at that, but if done right and with the right people, I think it would be a hit.

The Twelfth Night

Published on November 25, 2009 in Christmas and Ranting. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

On the twelfth day of Christmas the office plebs subjected me to…

Twelve ungrateful children stories,

Eleven far too expensive presents,

Ten Christmas TV discussions,

Nine badly decorated Christmas trees,

Eight Christmas diet plans

Seven office Christmas party plans

Six weans a playing up

Five expensive foreign holidays

Four crap Christmas jokes

Three stories about shopping centres

Two laptop present recommendations

And shit load of Twilight discussions

Flaptasking in the Wild

Published on October 28, 2009 in Langauge and Work. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

It’s been a few weeks since McDowall coined the term flaptask and, like I said, I’ve been trying to promote it’s use at The Work. As a large company full of management types that are clearly out of their depth most of the time there’s been many opportunities for me to drop the word flaptask and other related terms like flapbeast, flashflap, flapspam and flaptrap into polite office discussions.  The related terms haven’t really taken off to any great degree, but we did have a giant running game of trying to create new ones over the course of a day or so.

That was a couple of weeks ago though, and I’d all but forgotten about the whole thing when out of the blue I heard someone in the canteen complaining about a flaptask that his manager had come up with. Thing is the guy in question has nothing to do with my team, and I’ve never actually seen him before or since.

The implications of this are clear: The flaptasks are spreading…