I See Dumb People

...But not if they see me first!

Oh, wait.

This morning the panicmonger gave me a call. Yesterday evening I had sent her and Robert an email attaching some documentation for them to approve. The email began in the standard way: "Attached for your review, please find..."

Robert sent a reply to both of us this morning that he had reviewed the documentation and it looked good.

Then my phone rang.

"Where is the documentation?" inquired the panicmonger.

"Um. You mean the file attached to the email I sent?" I asked, confused.

"Yes, where is it?" she asked.

She must be asking me where the original is saved, I reasoned. "It's on my hard drive," I told her.

She laughed a little. "Well, how am I supposed to review it, then?"

I wondered if this were a trick question. "Um. It's... attached to the email?"

I heard her clicking around on the other end. "Oh, I see it," she said.

Somebody should buy her a bottle of peroxide, because the drapes don't match what's on the other side of the window.

I also got e-yelled at (bold type, not all caps, which the clueless sometimes innocently employ even in these enlightened times) by a client contact today. I didn't really fault him, because I am, after all, a faceless bureaucrat. I try not to be good at it. The client objected strenuously to providing some necessary paperwork I'd asked for, and copied the head of my division on his angry email to me.

So copying the same people, I wrote back apologizing for the frustration, explaining the necessity of what I had asked for, and offering to provide any help I could; but he did not appear to be mollified. The division head stopped by my cube a little later.

"That guy is an idiot," he told me, "in case you hadn't noticed. He also has a thing for yelling at women. We like to call him Shit-for-Brains, so don't let him get to you. I thought I shouldn't tell you this in an email."

I don't know why not. What does he think I'm going to do, publish it on the internet?

But really, as long as he doesn't yell at me in person, I'm fine. The sociopath in me enjoys the challenge of winning over a really tough customer. In this case, anyway, I can't give in - if I did, the work I'm preparing on his behalf simply wouldn't be approved by people who have a lot more authority than I do - but he didn't upset me.

The third dumbass in this post is me, for recounting two stories I've already told in person or via email to pretty much my entire readership already.