Slow Week

It ended up by being a rather slow week last week, especially at the end. Although all the old birds had come home to roost from their trips overseas 'visiting clients', their sole purpose in doing so was to turn up for the dreaded AGM. I've lost interest in attending. It does nothing for me. Reality and a Board of Directors are forces that never seem to have met - or is it that they act in equal and opposite directions? I can never remember - I wasn't very good at physics.
Anyway, due to this fortuitous circumstance and my beligerence with respect thereto, FO was tied up and didn't get to bother me much. Merk, with FO away, found himself very busy elsewhere. Arkle, having succeeded in his attempt to subvert half my team to the dark side (client services) has had no need to come to me and ask for each new task to be assigned. So, I have been trying to concentrate on helping out the engineers with their lack of resources, and simultaneously fob off anything else. This means that, by the end of the week, having sorted out yet another problem for Axis while he was off to lunch seeing off a colleague ("When I looked at the docco afterwards, it confirmed your suspicions about the tool" he said when he came back), I had almost nothing to do in the afternoon.
This is always dangerous. Leaving me with time to think is one of the 72 deadly sins, or something. It usually leads to me making stuff up and then pushing that out to others to implement. In this case, I'd already promised FO I'd go easy on the troops for a bit, and my energies all fell on Doodles. I had nothing to do. He was in his office with nothing to do - he was due to fly back here over the weekend. Between us, we racked up some increasingly heated emails with an ever-growing CC list along the lines:
"This is urgent."
"Why? I've never heard of it before."
"But the customer wants it!"
"That doesn't mean we have to provide it. Nobody else does. It's not a standard feature."
"Others do."
"No they don't (with reference)."
"They do - they just don't tell anyone." (You can't beat that hand.)
"We can only do it if our providers agree."
"These guys are the provider!"
(A quick check - yes, they are the client, and they represent the provider as well.)
"Then, in this case, we might be able to support a special release."
"But it's a small change! It won't take long."
"We should leave it 'til Monday."
"But it needs to be done now!"
At which point, FO came past, back from the AGM, and I deferred further inflamation until a bucket of water could more easily be applied. Sales people too easily get over-heated when deliveries don't occur. They tend to take it personally when their promises aren't met, and still don't learn that the secret to making a delivery is telling someone else that there's a distribution required - preferably before the due date.

"It must be bad - you're still wearing a tie."
"Not my f***ing funeral." he muttered, good-humouredly.

Don't get me started on expletives. It's all well and good to look around, realise that there's someone of the fairer sex present, and apologise, but it's too late. I'm not a prude, but I believe that there's a time and a place. For me, such things don't exist. For others, they should certainly be not around me. Mind you, the odd expletive artfully used is humourous on occasion (the first seven words of "Four Weddings and a Funeral"). In a business environment, though, it is not so much used for surprise or self-reproach, but as a weapon. That's where I draw the line.