Jester, Pennywise and Delusional People

During the general chaos of the move the Dark Satanic Mill yesterday, there was an unwelcome visitor to our department and Jester received a call from an old friend.

We’ll start with the unwelcome visitor. Pennywise came in looking all tanned and healthy to hand in his sicknote. He is signed off until August 31st. This was like a red rag to a bull for most of the jesters and caused one of us, Madness, to become almost apoplectic, so she turned round and said words to the effect of “Aren’t you supposed to be off sick? You don’t look very ill to me.” Jester wouldn’t even look at him. It is so galling when somebody who is supposedly off with depression comes into work looking tanned, healthy and most of all happy, when his or her colleagues are there working their arses off. Infuriating!!!

Later on, Gary saw Pennywise in Asda with his two sons and his wife, laughing and joking. Fortunately, Madness was not apprised of this, so she will not be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in the near future. Good job, really: I like Madness. I can’t say that about Pennywise.

Then, later, I had a call from my lovely delusional lady, who thinks she’s a criminal psychologist and crack a hardened paedophile in minutes, where it would take the police years. She is a lovely lady, although I am convinced she is a complete fruit loop (is that PC?) I wrote about her in a previous blog. When I realised who was calling, my face lit up. I know that because the office suddenly became brighter and I know there was genuine warmth in my voice when I asked the usually fatal words “How can I help you?”

She told me. She asked me to write a letter confirming that at no time has she ever handcuffed any of our engineers to her bath. Maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. This customer, let’s call her Julie, is diminutive. I have this on good authority, from Julie herself and from our very own Quality Assessor, who visited her house to inspect damage caused by our engineers. He told me (and this is in his exact words) “She’s a registered midget!” I have included the exclamation mark because it was there in his voice. So she’s small and birdlike.

She has a care worker and while her claim/complaint was going on, this care worker would be around the house, doing whatever she was there to do. One of the problems Julie had with our engineers (a common problem, unfortunately) was they rarely finished the jobs they were there to do, so once, she told me yesterday, she joked to her care worker that she should handcuff the engineer to the toilet until he had finished the job.

That seems a good idea to me and maybe when we issue policy documentation to our customers, we should enclose some handcuffs as a gesture of goodwill, although I’m sure any of our contractors who are reading this blog will blanch as they read this paragraph.

But I digress. Julie has not been very happy with her care worker and has criticised her and now, it appears that her care worker has had her revenge by accusing Julie of being a hostage taker and handcuffing the engineer to the bath. You should see me laugh while I type this (and the mistakes I am having to continually correct because I am shaking so much!) Julie has received a risk assessment of 4, which means that social services will not go into her house and she says she is suing the care worker and wants me to write to her to confirm that she has never handcuffed any of our engineers to the bath (or toilet for that matter) or taken them hostage.

I have agreed willingly. There is not much I wouldn’t do for such a delightful lady. I am not sure if what she has told me is firmly based in reality. As I said before, I am certain she is delusional, but the letter won’t hurt anybody, so I’ll write it.

Finally, she did send me the tapes. Four of them. Unfortunately, I have not listened to them. I have a CD player in my car. I hesitate to say this but I lied to her yesterday. I told her I had listened and they now had pride of place in my cassette collection. It was a white lie and I will listen to them oneday. It is simply a matter of time.

Jester and the Move

It was chaotic at the Dark Satanic Mill yesterday. At least it was in the complaints department. Our company moved into its current building in July 2004 and since then, it has recruited and recruited and recruited so the building is now bursting at the seams (incidentally, that is the name of a Strawbs album that I particularly like). The DSM has therefore bought (or should I say acquired? That’s good business speak after all) a new building to house some of the departments. Complaints is one of them. So we had to pack all our belongings away in crates so they could be moved to the new building yesterday at 3pm and we had to move to temporary desks in our call centre so our computers could be moved too.

Of course I moaned about it. Our department has a bit of a reputation of being miserable buggers and I didn’t want to give anybody the wrong idea. My colleagues Gary, Jeannie and Josie kept their spirits up by basically being very silly – having water drinking competitions and the like – until a manager came over and pointed out the error of their ways.

We move into the new building today and should have new everything, except CPUs (or boxes as we like to call them). I will unpack all my possessions, including my model of Michael Essien, Sigmund Freud, pictures of Dave Grohl, Frank Lampard and Jose Mourinho and last school photo of my youngest, Bobbie. Then I have to start ringing customers again. Never mind.