Petty Office(r)s

I have three days to catch up on all my tickets which no one looked at during my entire week of training. Customers are pissed. I've been officially pulled out of The System. Nevertheless, there's a Ticket Assignment Notification which just showed up in my mailbox. The System knows best.

Not only have I been assigned yet another Solaris problem I have no idea about, Steve has been assigned a problem requiring the ability to see the difference between Japanese characters. We agree to trade, unofficially and doing our best to hide the transactions which management will inspect to make sure we're being good little bitches.

A note last night from a US manager asks me if I can take over Yet Another Citrix Problem which was assigned to Someone Other Than Me, and in taking the reassignment it won't count toward my number of assigned tickets as far as The System is concerned; it only counts toward last Tuesday's assignment quota. I agree anyway.

An hour later comes another mail from some unknown name. Someone in HR. She's seen my profile pic, a particularly funny line drawing animation which has been my profile pic ever since $MegaCorp took over $BigCorp. I've received dozens of mails and IMs in favour of it. I have a link to a site of mine in my profile and dozens of people have clicked on that as well, so I know that they, too, have seen the pic. I know because I have the referrer logs of the site, all coming from xxxxx.$megacorp.com/yyyyy/zzzzz?=$REC_empno. But she's offended. I explained this in an E-Mail littered with management-speak buzzwords and other shitty language abuses that she and her ilk are more comfortable with, stating at the end that should she not change her mind, I would reluctantly -- in accordance with company policy -- remove said offending picture. No word back on that.

What else is in the mail? A note from Giacomo. He'll be back in Munich teaching the DBA1 course in a couple of weeks. Hot diggity! Off to Meathead to get approval for this course as well.

"Hey Meathead. Giacomo's coming back next week to do the DBA1 course. I need approv..."
"Nope."
"WTF?"
"You've already had your five training days this quarter."
"That's the minimum requirement per quarter."
"Right. And you've received it."
"But I didn't get any fucking training last quarter. Nor the quarter before that, nor the quarter before that!"
"But you got it this quarter. You can do the DBA1 next quarter."
"..."

Minima = maxima only when it's shit I want; I do far fucking more than the minimum number of tickets and still get pushed to "do more".

Fuming, I return to my desk. There's a mail from Mini-Me with an attachment. A screenshot of $OurBigInternalApp with a ticket, and in the owner field, Mini-Me's name. There was a second screenshot of another ticket, also assigned to him. In his note to our manager he wrote, "I'm kinda busy right now but I'll try to look at them later today."

Mini-Me left the company ten weeks ago but The System knows best.