Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I am fed up.

This is the second Monday in a row that my computer hasn’t worked when I’ve got into the office. Underneath my desk there is a mess of wiring that routinely tangles around my legs and to cap it all, the desk I am using temporarily comes with a chair that was clearly discarded by some banana republic’s torture department as unsafe.

I was going to bring my own chair around to use at this desk, but there is nowhere to stow the regular occupant’s own chair (the aforementioned torture device) and so I am stuck with it for now. He is a much smaller chap than me and it is set up accordingly. I would adjust it, but it is clearly a specialist orthopaedic thing, preset to his own dwarvish frame.

And to add outrage, the buggers have just fixed my PC, so I can’t even finish this rant…

I have just found an ancient box of floppy disks and tried one out.

It hasn't rusted over; it still works. I can save up to ONE MEGABYTE of information at a time. Oh, the nostalgia: it's like 1998 all over again (which is about the last time I used a floppy disk...).

There is a certain bemused joy in coming in to work after finding the internets a bit wonky at home, to discover that they are working properly in the office, but apart from email, that’s all there is.

I can open Word, Excel and the like, but not save anything (not entirely true since I have my flash drive with me), or access any of the shared drives. Once upon a time this wouldn’t have been an immediate problem. Although I habitually save my work on the P: drive on the server, I used to back it up to the local D: drive at least once every couple of days, so even if I couldn’t access the latest stuff I’d been working on, I could get hold of recent copies.

Not now, though. For the past three or four years we have been unable to access the local drives on our own machines. They are for the systems people only, now. We have to put everything on the central shared drives.

Today, however, none of those are working. I have email and internet and er… that’s it.

It’s going to be a long day.

Edited to add: In fact we have no email either. La la la...

A suffusion of yellow.

That is all.

Hoo ha. I have just had a sneezing fit that I thought wasn’t going to stop (though clearly it has). It was one of those horrible tickles high up in the sinus that you just can’t shift. That and the humidity have served to make me a soggy Bryan in the office today.

I’m pretty sure that the air conditioning still isn’t properly fixed, but then I always think that, even when it’s working properly, so I’m no judge, clearly.

I’m not the only one who is suffering from the temperatures – my lackey, who is normally quite mild mannered and patient has just had a ding-dong battle with some dweeb in accounts. The dweeb was clearly neither listening nor willing to pass the problem up the line, so Victoria is going to have to side step that contact and go elsewhere: last month’s payments run has not appeared on the system (the receipts, processed at the same time have) and at some point it will all come back, all red eyes, pointy teeth and stringy drool, to bite someone on the jacksie.

That won’t be us.

I have been tired all day, but this morning I was busy, so I managed to get over it.

This afternoon I am trying to proof read the consultation paper I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Proof reading is drab at the best of times, but this subject is drier than a pharaoh's sock and reading it is a lot less involving than drafting it. It is like revising for an exam; the initial work may be interesting, but revision is dull, dull, dull.

I have managed to smear paw grease all over my glasses because I almost nodded off reading the damned thing and suddenly realised that a) I was slowly nodding ever closer to the document, b) that I couldn't remember anything that had happened fopr the past 45 minutes and c) that my glasses had ridden up my forehead and over my hand as my head slid in the opposite direction.

I. AM. BORED. BEYOND. ALL. REASON.

I shall have to remember this. If this is what happens when he goes on holiday for a week, what is going to happen when he goes for good?

My boss is enjoying himself in Norfolk. I, on the other hand am sitting at my desk wondering if I should place a few strategic sandbags, don kevlar and a tin hat. You see, in addition to the usual jollities that happen across my desk, moseying in with a malevolent nonchalance to upset my day, it seems that before he left, my boss primed a number of explosives and/or incendiaries, put them on a time delay and launched them in my direction.

This means that in addition to the ever-growing list of emails that I have flagged up for attention but not yet returned to, I have other difficult and urgent matters erupting from the ether to land with a happy and self-satisfied slap on my desk. They sit here smirking at me and derailing my attempts to get on with stuff that is becoming urgent simply through age.

In the meantime, someone in accounts is bandying my name around as the policy stop for anything that they do not know the answer to, whether or not it is anything to do with me.

I am beginning to think that the world really does revolve around me...

Oh, waily, waily, waily,waily.

The new system is so secure we can’t get anything out of it. We were told to save all our files to the network G:\ drive as we would lose access to our local drives. Well, that happened. Unfortunately we never got our G:\ drive. We got someone else’s.

We have just managed a temporary fix that allows us to map our original G:\ drive to an existing X:\ drive, so at least we can access the folders and documents. Sadly I do not have MS Query anymore, which means that I can no longer interrogate our database. A quick email to the helpdesk elicited the response “what is MS Query?.”

We have people who know the answers to this and how to put it right, but they have had their administration rights removed, so they are as helpless as we are for the time being.

The fallback position of logging on through an unconverted PC and downloading the information we need onto flash memory and manually transferring it to our personal drives has been stopped dead by the fact that the USB ports have been disabled.

Thus far, LINK has been a disaster. DISCONNECTED is a more accurate term for where we are right now.

Oh, waily, waily, waily,waily.

Another day in the office and once again I am glad that I am bald, because I should otherwise be pulling my hair out myself¹. Our Local management Accounts Team seems to have made it their lives’ work to drive me to an early grave. They are immune, by way of innate stupidity, to the frightful sarcasm to which I subject them each time their idiocy impinges upon my life, but just stubborn enough to come back for more, seemingly unaffected. Ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

I no longer receive the same satisfaction I once did from being gratuitously impolite to them. It feels like using expensive and highly developed technology to fend off handmade flint arrows. Anyone whoever played Civilization on the PC all those years ago and watched in dismay as a bronze age phalanx from an isolated and backward civilisation bring down their strato-bomber will know how I feel.

We are being asked to state when our payments, due last Monday, will be made and explain why they were not made on time. Furthermore, we are supposed to have to do this cap in hand and with proper contrition as Treasury will fine the Department for getting its cash flow forecasts wrong.

The fact that we have evidence provided by the payments system that the only transactions that did not take place on time were those where invoices were issued to debtors and they have not acted upon them seems to be of little relevance. We still are expected to explain the non-existent lack of payment activity. My latest missive is being digested by the accounting drones. It is my guess that they will deal with it by resending the original email requesting an immediate explanation. I really shouldn’t let this wind me up, but I’m afraid it does.

I have decided that my brain power is being compromised somewhere down the line. I aim to tackle this by eating fish tonight, while Furtle is away on her course and trying to get further “bingos” ² in Scrabulous on Facebook. Of course this is largely out of my control; I can only work with the letters the game gives me, but it’s fun to try.³

More later, possibly, as my blood pressure rises.


¹As it is, the Strontium Pastilles^TM I used to suck as a kid, and which are responsible for my healthy green glow, took care of the hair problem quite painlessly over ten years ago!

²Using all the letters in your scrabble tray.

³colonel_maxim may dispute this, having been on the receiving end of two of them in consecutive turns, one on a triple word score. Heheh.

I arranged to work from home for some peace and quiet to get the proof reading done and finished.

There is a man out back torturing large lumps of metal with an angle grinder. From the noise it is making, I consider that the metal is in some distress over this sustained torture.

So am I.

Edited to add: At lunchtime, I am nearly halfway through the proof read. It is quite amazing what you can do when there are no interruptions. It has been helped by the fact that this is actually an excellent proof copy; 106 pages in and I have found only 1 mistake, although I have suggested a several formatting changes.

At this rate, I should be finished by about 4 this afternoon!