Whole Lotta Dumb

[teylaminh]

This is not work moaning, more, erm... mockery? I dunno. :P My colleagues have caught Stupid Plague this week. It must be the heat.

The majority of these involve Forgetful, but mostly because I've now reached the point with her that I had with Sandra all those years ago: where every little thing she does makes me angry or rolling my eyes at her idiocy.

• The majority of these actually relate to this initial stupidity: we had an IKEN upgrade over the weekend, which was idiotic in and of itself. Firstly, it's the end of the financial year and most of the building are on leave, so they'll have to retrospectively install the update in any event. Secondly, it reset all our preferences - search text defaults, column widths, colour settings, the lot. Thirdly, it broke the letter templates by reverting them all back to the ugly IKEN default. It's a miracle the work is currently within timescales, given we were mostly out of action yesterday for various reasons. (They've fixed the template issue, now importing attachments from emails doesn't work.)
  
  
• One major feature change is that the taskbar (a little ribbon containing function buttons) is now about three times as big as it was before. The only annoying thing from my point of view is that in order to get the "tooltip" text to show up underneath the buttons so you know what they are (the symbols are sketchy at best as to what functions they represent), you need to revert XP back to Windows Classic view, which is ugly - but useable, at least. For everyone else, the new gigantic taskbar - and subsequently the new gigantic front page of the application - takes up basically the entire screen. Despite numerous attempts / suggestions to the contrary, the other WPO's still refuse to set their screen resolution any higher than 800x600 (Moany's is even on extra-large text on top of that) so now they're complaining that it's too big. *eye roll*
  
  
• For some reason the roll-out has resulted in Moany forgetting how to make email attachments from within IKEN, even though the process is exactly the same as before. Er, what?
  
  
• We had a team meeting earlier. (After last time, I tried not to contribute but couldn't help myself in the end.) At this meeting, a discussion arose about the imminent (by December 2013 apparently) move to Windows 7 and Outlook (as opposed to XP and Lotus Notes as we have now). I mentioned that Paul, in Highways, was part of the focus group and that he'd been to the training, where they tell you all about the exciting new functions in Windows 7 (like the calculator - I'm not even joking, they actually sold this as a new feature) and how to use the widgets, except on getting back to the office it transpires - of course - that Service Birmingham have turned all the exciting new functions off. In case we break it, obviously.
  
  Aaaanyway, I made the point that even though Service Birmingham reckon the 1GB of RAM we currently have will be enough to run Windows 7, it may not be enough to run the four programmes we have to use concurrently - IKEN, Notes, Winscribe and MS Word (the last of which eats enough memory as it is - especially if we're moving to Office 2011 [ugh, DNW]). The amusing thing - or the fail, depending on how you look at it - was what Forgetful thought our current operating system was called.
  
  Just a pause for effect here.
  
  Expedia.
  
  I'm so glad I have enough self-control not to burst into hysterics in meetings. :P
  
  
• Finally, on the way back from the meeting as we were waiting for the lift (myself, Forgeful and Demoted), the security guard (John) engaged us in conversation about it as we'd walked back from KEH and must have looked exhausted thanks to the building being so hot. He asked if we'd had a meeting and Forgetful said something I didn't quite catch, but followed it with this:
  
  "As soon as they mentioned Woodcock Street I switched off."
  
  It's like she's literally hoping if she ignores it, it'll go away. REAL WORLD, FIND IT.
  
  
• Finally finally (I remembered this one after I got home), recently they set an email group for all the WPO's in Ingleby and KEH, so that fee earners could send things to the group rather than individuals (in case people have left for the day, etc.) Our fee earners probably have no use of this, but KEH fee earners tend to do their own typing and then basically send things to the WPO's to print out on specific paper. So, this afternoon a solicitor at KEH sent an attachment to the new group address, in the subject of which she asked for two copies to be printed on engrossment paper, etc., etc. A few minutes later I overheard Forgetful, having finally checked her emails 20 minutes or so after the event, saying, "Who's [name of fee earner]?". Frankly, she should have realised just from the word 'engrossment' that it was nothing to do with child protection work, and like me she should just have ignored it. But I think that's crediting her with two much common sense really.

We have to laugh or we would cry go on a screaming rampage with bazookas.