The players:

Boss Not Boss (BNB): Not my boss, but plays one on TV. My actual boss does something or another, but I rarely ever see him these days, so my co-worker got a kinda implicit, non-pay-increase promotion to tell us what to do. He’s a nice enough guy, but he frequently has a disconnect between what he is thinking and what he thinks he’s explaining, which makes information transfer a tricky and unreliable process. This extra sucks when it comes from the guy who’s telling you what needs to be done.

The UK guys: our company is owned by a company in the UK, and despite the fact that we are their largest, most profitable company, they tend to forget we exist. A year or two ago, we took their treatment of us and turned it into paranoia: most of the people in my group were convinced that the UK was taking on all our work in preparation for calling our jobs redundant. After two years of not being laid off, though, we’ve settled into a sort of dull acceptance that they just don’t care about us a whole lot, and we pick up the dregs of whatever mind-numbing work they don’t feel like dealing with.

Each of those items is worth a story in itself, but nevermind for now. That’s the setup for last week:

Tuesday: There’s a problem with a promotion process; marketing people can’t get their content to the live server. The promotion process was written by UK guy #1, but he’s on vacation. BNB tells me that UK guy #2 was working with UK guy #1, I should talk to him. BNB is going to be out for the rest of the week, so I’m going to take care of it. I make plans to call him the next day; it’s too late to call him, and I don’t bother with e-mail because we’ve essentially been told that we have to call people in the UK if we want their attention, and not expect them to reply to e-mail (not in so many words, but that’s also another story in itself).

Wednesday: I call UK guy #2 (hereafter “UK2″). Or try to. I call their receptionist, who then transfers me to UK2’s desk, which just rings 20 times or so. (Yes, receptionist; no, they don’t have direct numbers; no, they don’t have voicemail. And they’re 6 hours away, so we get a two-hour window in which we can work with them, because we can’t rely on e-mail.) I hang up and call back, but now the receptionist isn’t answering. I try a couple more times, no answer at the front desk, so I give up. I break down and send him mail, since by now it’s 11am my time and 5pm theirs, so he’d be gone, anyway.

Thursday: No answer to the email. I try calling again several times, but no answer at either his desk or the receptionist’s. I try picking other random UK names that I know, just in hopes of getting a warm body over there that can track down UK2 for me, but every call I make is not answered by whoever I pick, if I can even get a hold of the front desk to try transferring me to someone. I send him mail again, not really expecting anything will come of it. One of the marketing people is getting antsy, so I fill him in on the situation, and he sends email to UK2 himself, and cc:s two VPs on it. I don’t partake in that sort of fuck-you-cc:ery, but yay him.

Friday: No response to email. I call the marketing guy; no response to his, either. I figure I’ll give them another round of calls. After the 4th or 5th or so, I finally get a hold of someone!

Me: [Uk3]! Hi! Wow! A Person!
UK3: Er, hello?
Me: You know where [UK2] is?
UK3: Oh, he’s out today.
Me: [pause while I absorb this]
Me: Was he in this week?
UK3: Oh, yeah.

I hang up, and literally close my eyes and count to ten. It’s not something I really ever do, but the rational part of my brain saw the alarms coming in from the rage center, and cast about wildly looking for anything that could prevent me from becoming the next Guy Freaks Out At Office viral video. Requests down to Memory/Processing sent back the cliché with a note saying “here’s the best we got on short notice”, which was enough to distract Adrenaline Production so I could make some reasonable calls to marketing and let them know we’re screwed on the automated process, but I’ll get someone to move their files manually.

Monday (today): I get mail from UK2: “oh, I don’t know why people were looking for me for this, I don’t know anything about it.” I tell BNB this, he says “uh, yeah, I don’t know how you got that idea…I meant that he might know something about it, he sits next to [UK1].” Typically at this point I would question my own perception—maybe he told me the guy might know, but I misheard the guy actually does know?—but no, I’ve been in this situation enough times to know that he was thinking one thing and told me another.

Recently I’ve been lamenting my lack of interesting titles for my blog entries, and generally not being happy with my absent creativity. But in this case, it fits. This was just another work week.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Fine soul powder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.