Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Top Priority

What's this in my Outlook box? Some PDF nonsense. Let's open it.

It's from one of the bean-sifting eunuchs in accounting. He's upset. When he prints his reports, a very few of the thousands of data lines do not "line up nicely". When the data was input there was an occasional spacing inconsistency.
For every application we use here this is merely cosmetic. But his tiny rigid mind can't cope with such disorderliness. He has hand-labelled every spacing error, scanned it all into a PDF and sent it to me to correct. It probably took him a week to do that.
It looks like this, only it's a 2MB file:

Matter: xxxxz
Matter:xxxxz <----(handwritten: THIS ONE )
Matter: xxxxz
Matter: xxxxz

-this document goes on like this for many, many pages-

Can I fix this?, he asks.
Sure, I could if I gave even the tiniest dingleberry of shit about him, this job or the aesthetic purity of column margins.
But I don't. Life is too short for that.
I don't even bother to reply.

He calls to check on his request. How's that coming?

I assure him that I have "prioritized" his project.

This is office-speak for "I have deleted your entire email."

6 comments:

Amy said...

think happy thoughts... and... if that doesn't work... imagine mowing every accountant in the building down in a rain of gunfire... that always seems to help me.

amy

Allan said...

People get nervous when I discuss certain fantasies at work- that is one of them.

em0 said...

Another alternative is to "accidentially" change some of those nice capital M's to lower case. Also "accidentially" do two spaces.

And THEN mowing them down with gunfire.

Susannity said...

i think you should come up with an alternate pattern and then return it to him.

Matter:xxxxz
Matter: xxxxz
Matter: xxxxz
Matter: xxxxz
Matter:xxxxz

Ask him if he likes that symmetry.

Susannity said...

aw, it didn't post like i had done it. it was a nice arrow pattern.

STAG said...

two words...Billable Hours