New people are wankers.

I should preface this with a little note: I recently got told off for Twittering that some guy I work with is ‘a jumped up planner twat’. The reason I posted that this jumped up planner twat is a ‘jumped up planner twat’ is because he’s a jumped up planner twat. I’m still reeling that I managed to achieve a low level bollocking for this – it’s truthful and honest. If you can’t take a little constructive critiscm, don’t act like a jumped up twat. But, anyway, it’s a fair cop, I did post it on the internet.

Well, when I say I posted it on the internet, I posted it on my private Twitter. So no one except those carefully vetted individuals I allow to read my 140 character gold can read my carefully crafted e-rage. This also updates my Facebook status. Which operates under the same system.

Said jumped up twat isn’t actually on either guestlist, so he isn’t able to actually read what I’ve written about him. At this point, the whole thing becomes exactly like a lunch break when you spend the entire walk to and from Sainsburys telling Dan how much of a twat someone is. It’s private. What happened? Someone, a judas if you will, read this and showed the fella what I’d written. And he complained. What a pair of dickheads. I’m still a bit annoyed that the person who did this (I know who she is, I’m sure she knows I know who she is) keeps pretending I’m her friend and she talks to me like she hasn’t massively wronged me – insincere knobend.

So I’ve had a massive cull and cleared off everybody who crosses the Facebook/Work boundary and deleted them except for those people who once saved my life or bought me a biscuit, they can stay, I trust them.

Anyway – preface over. It was quite a long preface, yeah, but I guess I needed to point out that you should be really careful when you’re about to do what I’m about to do – call your management crackers. Let’s spin with the wonder.

There are more than a few people here, in positions more powerful than my own (90 % of the company) who are utterly incompetent (about 25% of that). I’m really lucky that the people I work with immediately, my boss, his boss, my boss’s equivalent (they share the same boss) are good dudes. They work hard and they know their shit. I owe loads to them and they make work bearable. I’m better than all of them at Fantasy League Football though.

But other people? They’re shit. Ask a question, wait two days for an answer. Or they come back in two days and ask you what you think. We have a head of IT who after some gentle cajoling from me actually asked our systems provider if they could reverse the polarity of the flux capacitor to make the server faster. He actually asked that. I should probably post that entire story, it’s incredible.

We have a finance team that are so eager to please the board they make wild promises that we then cannot deliver. We have a multi-billion pound asset base over hundreds of thousands of accounts – and they have promised that stock losses will be 0%. My house is worth 50p and I operate stock losses of 45%. It’s utterly fucking crackers. Why would you do that? Promise 20%, deliver 15% and everyone will think you’re amazing. Promise 0%, deliver 15% and you’re facing the sack. And I’m facing the sack. Everyone is facing the sack because not only do you not understand our business, you don’t understand business period. You have no idea how things work. I’m half your age and I know immediately that you’ve just pulled a seriously stupid stunt.

I’m going to make some tea.

I’ve changed the names of those involved to protect their privacy.*

That reminds me of the time we went to Bob’s 18th Birthday Party. I was driving there, and his mum said we could sleep in the lounge. Except we all got really hammered and accidentally broke some garden funiture (how many people can get on this chair – about 8 before the legs bend off) so she kicked us all out. But he lived in the arsehole end of nowheresville. Such a shit place to live. Such a shit place to be stuck drunk with a car and four mates. So we had to sleep in the car. We weren’t drunk enough to actually sleep so instead we beeped the horn every 15 minutes on the dot. Just long enough to let his parents fall asleep before the horn woke them up. At the time I had a swish Fiat Uno Start. Om Om. Had a horn like a 15 year old girls squeel. It was great until the bloke who lived next door came out and threatened to kill us. Except Jeff told him to fuck himself. So then he threatened to smash up the car (got it all backwards didn’t he, murder to damage). Then Jeff got out ran to the man’s house and shut his front door before running off down the road. So the man went fucking mental because it was 3am and he couldn’t get into his house and he lived alone. He was only wearing shorts and it was November time, so he was beggining to shiver a bit. Then he started screaming in the road at the top of his voice and someone threatend to call the police. This was a bit before everybody had mobile phones, I was an early adopter and had one but Jeff didn’t. I guess at the time I was the equivelent of todays iphone kids. But anyway, we didn’t know where Jeff was so i could drive off, and i was still drunk obviously. So we started telling this man stories about how hard our dad’s were and how they were wrestlers and that’s how we knew each other. He started attacking the car with a plastic rake so I had to drive 50m down the road. He started to chase us, then stopped, so i stopped. But when I stopped he started chasing us again. Anyway, we kept up this charade for about 250yrds. Did a u-turn and drove back down the road. The man was panting on the pavement so we just drove past him and parked up at the end of the road waiting for Jeff. The man sat on the pavement with his head and his rake in his hands, so we started beeping every 2 minutes this time and he went fucking mental again like King Kong. Then I drove round the corner to the village carpark and we all fell asleep. Jeff came back two hours later and woke us all up with a loaf of hovis and a block of cheap butter which we spread with my house key. They sure don’t make breakfast like they used to. Gunther was in the back of the car was straight edge but never learned to drive. What’s the fucking point in being a straighty and not learning to drive. Dickhead.

*and exagerated a bit.

I tend to keep my e-mails fairly short as well – it’s a tool. A communication device. Not a friendship creating magic wand.

Them: “Can we do X, Y or Z please and do it by circumventing the ABC?”.
Me: “No”.

You ask a question, you get a straight simple answer. I don’t want to enter into a debate about whether someone else could do it, or how you saw a Watchdog report on cowboy builders and how even they could flush the cache and glue the fuck to type quickly, I can’t do what you want. Let me do proper work that matters and that isn’t going to be changed halfway through me doing it and then changed again 2 days after I’ve finished.

I have a mind of my own and usually, when you wind me up, arm me with a specification/brief and point me in the right direction (2 tea’s please, YES AT ONCE) I’m quite capable of doing what I need to do. If I have a question, I’m going to get up, walk the ten feet to you desk, and whisper in your ear. I don’t need to e-mail you, because, quite literally I can touch my monitor and look, if I stretch a bit I can touch your monitor at the same fucking time.

If things get any worse here, we’ll stop answering the phones and start using them to send emails instead. Mouths will join up like that creepy bit in the Matrix and ears will fall off all over the place like a bout of electronic leperosy. All the time fingers will get faster and faster and the server will start spinning off the ground under the weight of all the CC’s. Whats that? An e-mail about a faulty door handle? E-mail the company! CC the world!! BCC God!!! DO IT!!!!

My knees are also hurting in the worst kind of way. Scored twice last night, which was lovely, we won 5-3 I think. Everything else I did on the pitch was a sack of shit. That’s not totally true, I put some great through balls in, bagged a hat-trick of assists, but we could have won by 20 goals if my final ball was a little better. That sounds big headed, I don’t mean it like that, what I mean, obviously, is that the rest of the team were playing really well, but I was the weak link.

Except one dude who called for it, so i passed it to him, and he actually jumped over it and then muttered “should have passed to feet”. Mental.

Anyway, my knees are like, bleeding. So sore. 3 hours of football only, how do pro’s cope? I guess by not playing on hard surfaces. Will definately drop one evening now the season is starting, can’t play four times a week, the wife will go apeshit and the knee’s will be even more unimpressed.

Dickhead body sometimes.

Job #1 is really enjoyable, if repeptitive in a very minor way. The idiot quota is fairly high, but I only belong to a team of 3 and the three of us are all ok dudes. No idiots in our platoon. Good money, bonuses etc make everything bearable, I just wish the rest of the business wasn’t full of goons.

Today I am working on the second coming of christ. I’m being facetious, it’s nothing to do with religion. It’s just really really important. It’s so important that it needs do be completed with “all due haste“. Don’t know about you, but I find that marginally irritating – I don’t usually drag things out for jolly’s – I’m pretty good at getting on with stuff in a timely manner. But still, the blunt point is, it must be completed as a number 1 priority with all due haste.

So anyway, bout 09.40 today I finished the first part, the form creation. Systems development for me usually follows the following pattern:

• Plan
• Create Form
• Get Feedback On Form, Improve
• Set up Validation/Mandatory Fields
• Set Up Database
• Set Up Database Insertion from Form
• Present Data
• etc etc.

There’s a good reason for this – if the form doesn’t fit requirements correctly and I spend 3 days setting up a validation script, I’ve wasted my time. So I can’t progress until the form is complete and more importantly, agreed upon by all parties else I open myself up to the very real possibility of some idiot saying “yeah it’s ok, but can you swap that bit and that bit, and we don’t want that bit anymore and we want these extra bits”. Shit you not, has happened before.

So remember, this is the most urgent project the human race has ever seen. And I requested a feedback meeting at 09.40, guess what. Still waiting. I’ve fannied around a bit, got some other stuff done and checked off, now I’m tapping the desk trying to teach myself morsecode for “I work with badly organised lunatics”.

Job #2 – that’s a real cracker. £22 cash in hand to sit and read a book for 4 hours. Sounds amazing right? It is. Well, mostly. The downside, and it is a pretty shear drop, is I have to periodically break myself away from my fantasy world written into pages between a glossy cover (decorated with a Tesco 2 for £7 sticker usually) to enter the fantasy world of tricked up drunk old racists. One man, who confided in me whilst buying a round that he couldn’t see his fingers anymore then told his wife to “shut up or I’ll smash your tits in”. Really surreal moment.

I would have thought they would of got bored of repeating the same conversation every week, but apparently they are so old and racist that they have mild Alzheimers. Every week it’s the same – immergents (sic.) are evil, 17 year olds are stab hapy and evil, council estates are baby making factories of evil and most distressing of all, Jeremy Clarkson isn’t as evil as other people think he might be.

What a bunch of dickheads. They make me sick sometimes. One 60+ guy (waist in inches, age in years), born in Australia as he proudly tells everyone (“I’M NOT FROM NEW ZEALAND YEAH, I’M AN AUSSIE WOO WOO”) completely missed the irony of saying “Yeah we should send all of them back where they came from..”. Gladly you racist old fuck, I’m right onto barge hire as I write.

Obviously sticking a slash in the filename breaks it all and the form stops working whenever an employee decides to save the form in that outlet.

But, and here is the kicker….. they never said anything. For 6 months they’ve been turning up, trying to save the form and then just leaving it. Amazing. It actually came to light almost by accident, dissatisfied employee mouthing off, you know the drill, when they say ‘even that new form thing doesn’t work properly, I prefer paper’.

The actual fix took me 2 seconds, swapping out the ‘/’ for a ‘-’ and taught me 3 valuable lessons today.

Firstly I definitely work with idiots. Why the hell would they not say anything when it was clear that the form wasn’t working? We have a helpdesk set up to sort these problems out. It’s even got a shortdial number.

Secondly people in Portsmouth are all mental morons without the common sense to call their pubs proper names like The George and The Pissing Sparrow. I bet ‘Moron/Idiot’ is some kind of weird metrosexual wine bar where everyone laments the end of Sex and The City and everyone drinks Metropolitans long into the night. Right down with the sailors I’m sure.

And thirdly, I probably should make use of a JavaScript function to strip special characters out of string variables before setting them as filenames. Probably.

It’s amazing though when someone takes it a step further and tries to teach you to suck eggs at the same time, whilst completely oblivious to the round house super kick I’m launching right at their face.

I made this system, it’s pretty good if I say so myself, that allows users to submit work requests. It even has different categories for the submissions which in turn dictate who receives the request in order to make the decision. The point is, different people decide different things and there are several clear rules as to who decides what. Nothing really happens if it goes to the wrong person it will just be rejected and the moron that did it wrong will have to re-submit it. If the wrong person accepts the work request, well then they’re also stupid – it’s their budget that’s affected.

So this hypothetical double fuck up actually arose yesterday. An idiot submitted a request to the wrong person. That person then accepted the request despite it not being their responsibility.

I got an email telling me that I needed to fix it from someone so far unconnected. This person is bottom of the food chain. Bottom of the soup. A keyboard monkey. They action the request once it has been accepted by (in this case) the idiot. So, they email me: ‘This is wrong, fix it’.

Fix what I say?

MAKE IT RIGHT BECAUSE IT IS WRONG AND YOU SHOULD FIX IT DON’T QUESTION ME IT IS MY JOB. FIX IT.

Ok….. not sure if you’ve been to business e-mail for morons school yet, but CAPSLOCK IS FOR WANKERS. So, my eloquent reply in the face of such a moronic electronic monstrosity of brain sick?

“Dear xxxx, you are correct, this request has been submitted to the wrong person, but if that wrong person accepts the job then it should be raised regardless – please raise the job”.

YOU ARE WRONG BECAUSE IT IS THE WRONG PERSON. ANY REQUEST THAT (I’ll have to remove the specifics) SHOULD BE SENT TO (…) NOT (…). THIS IS WRONG. THE REQUEST HAS BEEN SENT TO THE WRONG PERSON. THIS NEEDS FIXING ASAP. PLEASE CHECK YOU’RE UNDERSTANDING OF THE SYSTEM AND FIX THIS ASAP.

Grammar fail much? You’re understanding? Thanks idiot!

My reply – “I know how the system works, I made it. I also finalised the process that it underpins. Just raise the job.” was pretty restrained I thought. Felt like walking downstairs and putting their head through their monitor.

Mind you, a flatscreen monitor wouldn’t make as much mess as an old CRT – I probably might have been better using their keyboard as a head bat.