Inbox: (412/13279)

Internal Ticket: DE1755-FG12
From: REC
Subject: Smee again. Moar mail quota pleez
Summary: GeeMale gives me seven gigs per account but I can't use them for corporate mail. Please increase my one account here to 500MB.


Memory is a tricky thing. Misremembering is terribly common. "Didn't the same thing happen a couple of years ago?" Close, but since $Thing wasn't terribly important, time has passed, and a few details match up, the mind tries to fill in the rest, usually to my detriment. And any time some übermanager misremembers something about me I have to nip it in the bud quickly or suffer the consequences of a (not always undeserved) bad reputation, such as with my "communications skills"

-----Original Message-----
From: $MegaCorp IT
Sent: 2010.06.12 21:08
To: REC
Subject: Re: Ticket DE1755-FG12 - Smee again. Moar mail quota pleez

Your inbox contains over 14,000 mails. Your older mail should be archived. We must have a justification for this amount of mail server usage.

Justification 1: Since even the programmers come to me for Unicode help and I'm an expert in Areas $1, $2 and $3, I have to constantly send & receive large diagnostic files. Because I am often working remotely these files must remain on the server to ensure transfer.

Justification 2: We have a some lying motherfuckers here and I have to cover my ass, which means searching through three fucking years of mail using my wife's $300 netbook on a borrowed wireless connection during my vacation instead of walking my kid on the beach.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.04.22 21:51
To: REC
Subject: Legit question

No problem. Sorry but we're waiting on QA for confirmation. I'll let you know as soon as I have the info.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.04.23 21:36
To: REC
Subject: Re: Legit question
Body: Any update?

I told you yesterday we're waiting on QA. I also told you yesterday that I'll let you know as soon as I have the info.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.05.03 21:36
To: REC
Subject: Re: Legit question
Body: ANY UPDATE YET?????????

You're pissing me off, Sal. When I get the info I'll fucking tell you.

From: Sal P.
Sent: 2010.05.11 22:15
To: REC
CC: $Clueless1, $Clueless2, Sal's_Manager
Subject: REC won't answer my question!

I don't have QA confirmation yet. Wash out your twatsilicates.

From: Sal's_Manager
Sent: 2010.05.20 00:47
To: Sal's_Manager's_Manager
CC: Sal
Subject: FW: Re: REC won't answer my question!
Body: REC should answer Sal's question.

You fucking fuck.

From: Sal's_Manager's_Manager
Sent: 2010.05.26 03:18
To: Sal's_Manager's_Manager's_Manager
CC: Sal, Sal's_Manager, Sal's_Manager's_Manager
Subject: Re: FW: RE: REC won't answer my question!
Body: REC should answer Sal's question.

No surprise.

From: Sal's_Manager's_Manager's_Manager
Sent: 2010.06.01 09:14
To: REC's_Manager
CC: Sal, Sal's_Manager, Sal's_Manager's_Manager
Subject: Re: FW: RE: REC won't answer my question!
Body: REC should answer Sal's question. Didn't we have a problem with with REC's responsiveness before? Please discuss the matter with him.

WTF?

From: REC's_Manager
Sent: 2010.06.03 09:14
To: REC
Subject: FW: Re: FW: RE: REC won't answer my question!
Body:Can you please respond to Sal's question immediately?

Surprise!!!

I'mma bury this bitch. But as my paws pound out the poison I remember that I need to look "dignified" and "professional" so I try to channel Lassie and "set him on fire" in a way that won't burn me as well.

From: REC
Sent: 2010.06.01 11:33
To: everyone in the two mail chains
Subject: Re: FW: Re: REC won't answer my question!
Attachment: $Mail1, $Mail2, $Mail3, $Mail4, $Mail5, $Mail6
Body:All,

I have already sent out an E-Mail explaining that this document has been updated. Attached please see the mails I'd previously sent directly to Sal (22 April, 23 April and again a week later on 03 May -- attachments 1-3) that QA had to confirm information about $Problem. Once I finally had the information I updated documents and included a special note. This was only just confirmed and approved by QA on 18 May.

I updated and then announced the document to my manager on 19May. He forwarded this to $REC's_Manager's_Manager to then be pushed worldwide (see attachment 4). I also sent a direct note to Sal and included a copy of that announcement mail (attachment 5), answering his question in full and adding a lot of extra information to ensure customer satisfaction with Sal's thorough answer.

I'm sorry it took so long but that was entirely out of my hands. I don't have the authority to make QA confirmations such as those concerning this or any other similar matter.

This is not the first time Sal has demonstrated a lack of patience and understanding of the business processes we follow. Two years ago Sal started escalating demands for response and action on my part as we waited for a patch simply because I was the one who filed the defect (see attachments 5 & 6). Perhaps that is what Sal's_Manager's_Manager's_Manager is thinking of because we have had no other direct contact since then.

Please note that I have been on vacation for the past 10 days and will not be back in the office until next Friday.

Love,
REC

The übermanager remembers he was bothered with some petty shit involving me. The upside is that now with this repetition and reinforcement he'll remember it's all because of his own fuckwit underling and not me.

And now it's all BadPuppy's time. She hasn't learned to be furious at these fuckwits yet but she's making it abundantly clear that she's annoyed Papa Dog wasn't paying enough attention to his whelp.

I Got Your Back

I am the worldwide expert in $Subject. I have been the worldwide expert in it for years. Cow-orkers all come to me for assistance. Programmers, when they have to make a new fix for $Subject, come to me. PM asks me. Our customers' upper fucking management gets sent to talk to me.

Hey, REC,
Can you tell me about the impact of FOO and BAR when dealing with $Subject?
-Gary

Sure, it'll only take me an hour to do some research and write up the two pages. But why do you give a shit, Gary? You don't deal with $Subject. You're a fucking line manager.

REC,
I need that answer pronto!
-Gary

I sent it to you yesterday, Gary. Our mail system is perm-b0rked. Here ya go again.

Hey REC,
Thanks a lot. This sorts out the questions. I think I'm going to make you my back-up on $Subject.
-Gary

You'll what? A blind, lobotomised, quadriplegic Robin is going to make Batman his back-up? Yeah, right, whatever. Hell, Clinton offered Obama the VP slot after she lost a few more states.

But... Hold on a sec... what are all those lines and names in this mail?

Oh, I see.

Isn't that interesting?

Gary forwarded me the wrong mail. Last week it would've been the right mail; it's wrong now. It shows the reason he needed my explanation of $Subject: every $MegaCorp division had to provide this information concerning their apps and products. To $MegaCorp's Super-Senior VP. And instead of telling SSVP to talk to me, Gary's taking the credit.

$Subject may change as soon as April. Gary will pay dearly.

Cow-orkers VII: Is That a Knife in My Back or Are You Just Happy to Use Me?

I just got a note from Kris, a manager two levels above me. Lenny is out on holidays and won't be back until January. I'd given him some advice on a ticket and he'd (surprisingly) done the proper thing and credited me with an assist. Unfortunately that meant that since the customer came back with another question, I was asked to give further answers. That meant I had to read through the entire ticket.

Lenny had been playing Chinese Whispers (or "Telephone").

Lenny, Lonnnie and Larry comprised a group we called "Triple Threat" (Trip-Ell Threat -- yes, I know lame it sounds). For a few years they were in my Functional Team. They were a close-knit group and all easily took offence when I fired off an E-Mail about on or another's behaviour or response to a customer. They became indignant as I rewrote their Knowledge Base documents, cleaning them up for style and content. We're not part of Microsoft's marketing and there's no reason that a technical document needs to contain "Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server Operating System" even once, much less on every single reference.

They'd run off to tattle and cry to the managers at every one of the perceived offences, embellishing their stories wherever possible. They'd likewise sic management on my if I didn't drop everything I was doing to answer their questions immediately. They looked for every possible way of causing trouble, and it all started because I'd once had the audacity to try to help one of them (Lonnie, I think it was) and fix his damned document before it went to PM.

And so ensued a war of sorts for two years, the Cerberus of LLL vs. little ol' REC. I couldn't tell them a thing and learned not to bother asking them for any assistance since the only answers I'd receive were crafted to look right and be wrong. The stupidity and pettiness began to peter out when I visited the London offices for a week and dealt with them in person, calming their egos a bit, but the enmity remained. After Larry left the company and Lonnie moved to a different team, I was only left with Lenny to deal with, and rarely since he worked the other end of the spectrum of our team and our work rarely overlapped.

He was still annoying, demanding full assist credit if he answered a single minor question confirming something like a version number or file directory. Such are his petty ways. He's going for a record on a metric which only has to exist; high numbers of assists neither bring any additional accolades (or money), nor do they excuse your ticket load as one of our locals knows all too well.

To his credit if someone gave him a significant piece of information or more than passing assistance he'd credit the assist. I stumbled over a ticket he'd been working on while looking for something else and saw the answer, a defect which I'd dealt with many times but which the customer hadn't discovered correctly. By that I mean he didn't notice a couple major symptoms and his problem description seemed to be about something entirely different. I sent Lennie a quick note with a test for the customer and the internal bug tracking numbers, saving his ass on a month-old ticket for which he had no direction.

He'd been contacting me by IM or mail every few days for some other freaky problem. The problem was based in Resonate, that wonderful/horrible load-balancing software. There are only three of us at the company who even deal with Central Dispatch anymore so it wasn't much of a surprise that Lennie'd come to me: of the three I'm the only native English speaker.

Using the team leader's note in the Prio-1 ticket, Lennie took ownership and sent a response. There's an internal entry for a mail between us a few days later when the customer came back. Right after a response signed by Lennie and copypasta'd from my mail with every warning Lennie didn't see before. And the next activities were the same. All of them.

Now it's my ticket and I got to the root of the problem which turned out to be a very different problem indeed. Because he didn't ask for their network diagram after the first signs of problems (Resonate would only work if it was the first NIC binding). My technotard girlfriend couldn't design a more perverted architecture if my vengeful, technically capable, psycho-bitch ex-girlfriend helped her.

One mail with an architecture correction and new diagram resolved everything.

I'm onto Lennie. Had he been a bit more clever, he could've asked one of the other two Resonate experts to cover that ticket and I might not have seen it. Stab me in the back repeatedly, use me continually, then go on hols and give me a chance to find out?

Fuckwit.

x-posted from HuSi, with a poll.

P.S. Enjoy a holiday GooTube link.