"I can't find this information in the file!"
"Have you looked anywhere else for it?"
"I guess I'll have to, won't I?"
Pause.
"Can you tell I'm not running on all cylinders today?"
Which is, quite frankly, terrifying. If she thinks she's not performing to her usual standards, what am I going to be afflicted with today?
Snap quiz time again:
Someone delegates a task to you, asking you to take care of it and let the client know the outcome. Do you:
- Do as requested; or
- Find the information, deliver it to me verbally and then ask me to pass it back to the client when I'm very obviously in the middle of trying to do something else?
The Cow-orker Conspiracy Factory gains further momentum today when a few badly-chosen words by an individual elsewhere in our division provoke a storm of criticism of the division as a whole. After weighing up all the issues in the debate, the Cow-orker reaches the conclusion that this was all foreseen by our division's director, who had carefully chosen this time to be absent rather than be around where he could have prevented the situation arising. The glaring hole in this theory, of course, is motive - why would our supreme leader abandon us to a brutal PR pasting when a simple message or two from him could have defused the entire situation? But like all good conspiracies, this one, too, is proof against reason.
"He must have known this would happen!" she repeats.
Yes, and JFK deliberately chose that day to go for a drive without his bullet-proof helmet...
While a furious debate rages on an e-mail discussion list, the Cow-orker observes: "It's an interesting distinction, isn't it? If you spam this list with something that doesn't belong there, people just get so upset, but this is something people are concerned about and no-one is complaining about the volume of posts! You have to laugh at the mindset..."
Naturally the Cow-orker's own thoughts on the issue (which has heavy implications for the autonomy of other divisions within our organisation) are as conciliatory as you might expect, as she burns with a crusader's zeal to go out amongst the godless heathens, lay waste to their internal IT infrastructure with fire and sword and inform they're all idiots and that THIS IS HOW IT'S GOING TO BE, BY GOD!
Luckily our manager had the foresight to pre-emptively muzzle her as soon as this even looked like becoming an issue. Surprisingly, she obeys.
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