Office Politics March 20, 2009

I have been working on the departments intranet. Its been a long slog, weeks of fiddling about with margins only to have a numpty mess it up and have to re-do it all. Its a fairly simple site that should be easy to maintain but I’m proud of it. Its nice having done something of value (and tangible). To entertain myself whilst doing this and not banging my head against the wall because I’m stuck listening to an American country music radio station, I made up a few quotes to go in the header. Ok so its unprofessional and I really should have learnt my lesson from chair-gate but bloody hell,  some people here are right pencil pushers.  Let me explain.

 

My dept is split between two different sites. Theres the main one which I’m at, and theres the other one which has about 5 people in it. I’ve only met them twice (theres one person I haven’t met) and they’re a bit weird. I decided to do up the intranet and got the go-ahead. I created a page and in order for it to exist I had to publish it. So I chose the page on our site which I thought was the least popular and put up a link for test page. This linked to the new home page which the rest of the new site linked to.  I thought it would be cool to have a quote related to our dept as a little sub-title (there’s  a quote on the old intranet) but didn’t like the old one so just made something up to fill the gap. This evolved to dafter and dafter quotes on other pages from the likes of Obama, Stalin, Genghis Khan, John McCain and others. The quotes tended to be related to the page they were on and were so cutting and fantastically satirical the writing crew from Have I Got News For You would have had kittens. Most people saw the quotes. They laughed. Many didn’t get them. Then, 4 weeks of nothing. I had done all I could and was now waiting on somebody else. Death. Stillness. An empty a void. My world was blank. Until today. Somebody from the other site went on the intranet, onto the page no one goes on and clicked test page. They saw the site and everything on it. And what did they do? Did they  think:

 

Oh cool, new site? The one that our team did in 2003 (I’m being serious) looks like it was made on Paint (I’m still being serious  – it was) compared to this one. Wow cool. Oh look daft quotes, lets email the other team and let them know.

 

If you know me (and if you’ve read this far then you probably do) you’ll have figured out this is a little game I tend to play in my rants. Ask a question, answer it how I would like it be answered and then have the truth laid out full throttle on the following lines. Here it comes:

 

No. They did not think this. Instead they rang (so archaic) our site, bitched and complained that we’re lucky it was them who saw it and brought it up rather than someone senior and then who knows what forms and paperwork would have to be filled out. And in order to complete those forms they’d probably have to carry out a risk assessment on how likely it is that someone will use the pen as a weapon in a Jason Bourne stylee and how poisonous the ink is. Nevermind that those quotes have been sat up there for 4 weeks without anybody noticing (and yes I am going to choose this moment to applaud myself on choosing a dull enough page to publish on). Its not that I hate she complained, I’m glad I took the new site down (minus rib tickling quotes) because the longer it was up there the more likely it was someone with something up their arse saw it. To be honest I should have removed the quotes when I stopped working on it but it didn’t enter my mind. Its the way she complained I hate. It wasn’t ‘I dont think the quotes are appropriate. ‘ Or even better, an e-mail. Its how self righteous she was about it and how long she went on for. I don’t think the news has reached the head yet, and it won’t reach the deputy until mon because he’s off so I don’t know how they’ll react (especially after chair-gate…) but I’m hoping they’ll be on my side.

 

The worst part is we have an away day next month, I wonder how the other site will treat me then…