15th February, 2002.

Situated as I am in the fallout zone surrounding the Cow-orker's phone, I'm learning a surprising amount about things I've apparently been saying or doing in the last few days. I've been pretty scathing things about people (which is arguably true, but not about these specific people) and have been having no end of trouble with other people (which, again, is arguably true, but not with the people she's talking about).

The total absence of anything like professionalism or discretion in her work-related phone calls is mind-blowing. I'd be appalled at the amount of time she's wasting on the phone with her peculiar brand of character assassination, but the upside is that while she's engaged in it she's not bothering me directly. After a fifteen-minute barrage it becomes too much and I flee for a coffee-break, only to find on returning that she's still in full swing, repeating the same stories to a different person at the same company.

In the space of less than five minutes she produces the following gems:

• bad-mouthing of other staff within our organisation to the supplier (identifying the staff member by name and department);
• bad-mouthing of other suppliers (identifying both the company and the employee);
• informing the supplier several times that they, on the other hand, "kick arse";
• telling the supplier exactly what quotes she's been receiving from other sources, the names of the people she's been getting quotes from, personal appraisals of their relative competence, and who she hopes gets the best quote (not the supplier she's talking to, either!).

After finally getting off the phone she surfaces for air, fills her lungs again and rings another supplier to begin again!

Deciding to share the pain around (and because I'm not senior enough to the Cow-orker to successfully rein her in) I consult our manager in the hope there's some training course we can send the Cow-orker to, where people are beaten with rolled-up newspapers and knotted towels until they're capable of showing some restraint on the phone. Unfortunately there isn't, but I experience the rare joy of seeing my manager clutch his forehead in pain exactly the same way I was doing ten minutes previously.

This isn't the first time this has come up.

Last year the Cow-orker was gleefully bad-mouthing a particular member of administration to everyone on the phone, which was bad enough in itself. What made it worse was that in the grand scheme of things this person was one of the highest people in our organisation and one of the few people our division is directly answerable to. In ecclesiastical terms, if our supreme leader is God, this person would have been the Pope. When our manager became aware of this and approached the Cow-orker about it (charitably assuming she didn't appreciate who she was maligning) he was horrified to learn that the Orker-of-Cows knew exactly who they were slandering and couldn't seem to understand that this was an extraordinarily careless thing to be doing.

And this, among other things, is why my manager repeatedly apologised to me at my performance review for making me work with the Cow-orker.