Monday 15th

Monday morning, and it's time for the fortnightly IT management meeting. The Operations Manager is conspicuously absent. The boss explains that he is in a meeting with the Personnel Manager. I wonder what that can be about? I suppose it could be something to do with those e-mail messages I sent on his behalf to the female staff. After the meeting I decide to log into his account to see what replies he's had.

I can't; he's changed his password. Suspicious bastard.

Not to be thwarted I decide that now would be a good time to install the utility I wrote at the weekend to search all the mailboxes on the server for e-mails containing the word 'sex'. After a few minutes it's up and running and forwarding the results to my account. There, that's what I was looking for: a sharply worded memo from Personnel to the Ops Manager about sexual harassment. Tutt, tutt. I think his wife should know about this. I print off a copy and mail it to her. Should give her something to think about.

I go for a coffee and return to find the phone ringing. It's Frank from Accounts again. He's now spent several days wrestling with C++ and given up trying to write his own database. I'm surprised he persevered so long.

"Look, Billy, this C++ stuff is far too complex. I need something simple and quick to use, and which doesn't involve me having to learn to code in some bizarre language that looks like it was created by a dyslexic coke addict with a hangover."
"Maybe you should try putting all your data into a spreadsheet instead."
"Well, I've decided I'm going to need to handle general queries with multiple table joins, and I'll need support for transaction tracking with full back-out capabilities. Will the spreadsheet be able to do that?"
"Of course it will. Spreadsheets can do anything these days."
"OK, I'll try it and let you know how it works out."
What a mug.

I grab some lunch and belatedly check my diary for the afternoon. Ye gods! I have a review of performance in half an hour and I've completely forgotten about it. I know I'll be assessed on the size of the backlog of call requests in my queue, so reluctantly I log in and take a look at it. Not a pretty sight. I decide to improve the situation by changing all the software installation requests to memory upgrade requests and reassigning them to the hardware support team. Then I deal with all the calls that are reporting bugs and other problems by attaching together a copy of every on-line manual we have and e-mailing it to the callers. That should slow them down a bit.

With two minutes to go I have a completely empty queue. I print out the record and take it with me. Maybe this review won't be so bad after all.