Hey Dingbat!

Our Functional Team leader knows of this blog. Being German however, he knows not of All in the Family and so may take offense at being called "Meathead", but that's going to be his name. It's not nearly as bad as his office nickname which is, more or less, "cunt".

Joseph Heller wrote the script almost 50 years ago.

I'm the Duty Monkey today. I get to look at every fucking ticket which comes in and decide if it's really, really important and which group of ours gets stuck with it. There've been a lot of tickets coming in lately in my specialty areas but I'm no longer getting them, the reasons for this being withheld until I can figure out an analogy which won't clearly identify my employer and get me fired before I send my very long and detailed explanation of every reason why this new system is such ass.

REC: Hey, Meathead. I've got the morning's backlog sorted. Oh, and I can take ticket #A23-88ZQ. It's about $Issue which I did all the research on and wrote all the documentation about six years ago. Piece of piss.
Meathead: Nope. I'm assigning it to Klaus.
REC: WTF? He wasn't even with the company when that version was released!
Meathead: But he's coming up at the top of my list so he gets it.
REC: He's fucking swamped!
Meathead: Not according to the list here.
REC: Did you ask him if his workload is accurately represented?
Meathead: No need. The system says he's available.
REC: He just told me he's not, and in 15 minutes he's taking over as Duty Monkey.
Meathead: Well, he'll have to manage.
REC: Just give me the fucking ticket. I've already talked to him. He doesn't know this shit. The only person in Europe who does know it is me.
Meathead: I can't do that.
REC: Why the fuck not? You know damned well that I'm going to be the one resolving it anyway.
Meathead: See? You'll get an assist!
REC: I don't need a fucking assist. I need a ticket so that I don't get assigned some other problem that I have no idea about.
Meathead: I can't give it to you.
REC: Why the fuck not since I'm going to be the one to resolve it?
Meathead: Because you want it.
REC: What the...?
Meathead: You can't choose your tickets. They have to be assigned now. And since you want it that's like picking it yourself and you can't do that so I have to give it to someone else.
REC: Because I'm the only person available who knows how to resolve the problem you're not going to give it to me?
Meathead: Right.
REC: So instead I have to resolve it anyway but I won't get the credit.
Meathead: Exactly.
REC: And I'll have to do this resolution while I'm struggling to find some person who happens to know how to handle the shit you assigned to me that I haven't got a clue about.
Meathead: Precisely.
REC: This is fucking insane.
Meathead: This is how we have to do things. Oh, I do have a ticket for you: #A12-1AP0.
REC: And it's about... what exactly?
Meathead: Pending threads in a DB2 system running on OS/390 causing crashes. I'm sure you'll figure out something.