The chicken or the egg?
*taps fuse box*
*pennies rattle*
Right, so I'll just take a cautious step back while the dodgy thing with dodgier Macgyver fix continues to be working, and address the subject line. In the eternal mystery of what came first, I'm pretty sure my headache is the cumulative product of other people's stupidity.
To explain:
I've been taking a page from the gold nugget of wisdom hidden deep within the bowels of Jupiter Ascending, wherein the heroine exclaims, "If I don't care, nobody can hurt me," and applying it to the bullshit I have to deal with at work. Among the things that I've learned from this important life lesson are:
- It's awfully hard to make yourself not care, when you're by nature someone who gives a shit, but once you get over that initial hump, things become relatively stress-free;
- Once people unconsciously realize that Someone No Longer Cares, there's nothing holding them back from Making Idiots Out Of Themselves;
- There's endless entertainment potential in taking that very important step back and allowing people free reign; and,
- Inevitably, the enormity of other people's stupidity becomes so great that the hilarity eventually devolves into a mind-numbing despair (usually in the form of a tension headache) at the present state and future potential of society.
I am, however, going to continue to not care, because my email inbox has never been so empty, my workload is almost non-existent, and I'm almost bored enough to start experimenting, and we all know what happens when I do.
(Spoiler alert: things kind of do a little, harmless boom. Nothing to be worried about, I promise.)
Anyway, as an example of the above and the result of this tension headache, a couple of months ago at a meeting I advised, very strongly, that we consider doing A, because while our current stopgap approach is OK for the short term, it's only a stopgap approach, and things are going to go wrong, guaranteed, and I know this because I'm the fucking expert, and also, I've done the work to prove it. Two people who are Not My Supervisors, but have fancier job titles than mine, but who also don't know what the fuck they're talking about, said that there's no point in doing A, because the permanent fix is supposed to be implemented on B.
At that point I had a moment where I wanted to say that we've been waiting for B to happen for years, but there's still no sign that B will ever happen, but I remembered that I'm not supposed to care, and also that the person responsible for B was also at the meeting, so I just made a nonsensical noise, shrugged, turned to my actual supervisor, and said, "It's your call." Peer pressure from people who are not his peers meant that he folded like a stack of cards and insist that B happens sometime soon.
Fast forwarding to now, a couple of months later in which B is still not happening and does not look to ever be happening. While I was home puking my guts out from Flu #2, a bunch of emails started flying around highlighting an example of the very same problem I warned might happen if we didn't do A. One of the two people who pooh-pooed my recommendation wastes days trying to figure out why it's a problem (and his conclusion is wrong). The other person who pooh-pooed my recommendation is flipping her shit and is saying we have to redo months of work, but first we have to fix the problem, and in the meantime we're going to shove all this work onto another section.
So I read all this while munching the plain toast that is the only thing I could keep down at the time, consider the situation with a great deal of eye-rolling, and crack my fingers before hitting REPLY TO ALL. In my email, I very diplomatically say, "You guys are both wrong, I talked about this two months ago at the meeting, the reason why and the fix A are detailed in the minutes (see attached), there's no need to overreact, I'm sure the B you said would be implemented soon to take care of this situation will be ready to go any day now."
Skipping forward to yesterday, there's an email from one of the persons Who Is Not My Supervisor, insisting that we address the issue right away by doing A. The other person Who Is Not My Supervisor replies to say that she agrees and we need to do this right away. I somehow, miraculously, restrain myself from emailing back, "Fantastic idea, wish I'd thought of it," but mostly that's because by that point my actual supervisor manned up and emailed, "We are aware of the situation, we will continue as usual, and if this very rare and improbable situation happens again, we'll take C steps to address the issue. In the meantime, we're going to continue waiting for B to happen."
Today, I get an email -- and the current resulting headache -- from one of the persons Who Is Not My Supervisor, asking me to do a thorough ruggedness testing to determine if this event could happen again. I already know it won't, in the same way that I knew there would be a problem in the first place -- I already did the fucking work, you dipshit -- so I respond with a cheery, "Sure thing," and file his email appropriately (read: the Deleted folder).
I have no intention of doing any further work on the issue.
But seriously. Do these kinds of people thrive on making idiots of themselves or something?