The Downward Spiral

So I arrived in this morning full of, shall we say, utter fucking dread. But it is the nature of this industry that the unexpected can and does happen all the time.

In my inbox was another tasty, delicious, horrific bollocking from the United States. Honestly, I grow weary of these, but having it in e-mail is preferable to being alternately patronised and shouted at on the phone for twenty minutes, at least. However, very helpfully, these documents were copied into myself, The Boss, some of our collective superiors and a bunch of other people in various U.S. Departments of Bureaucracy.

Because it's always great fun to be publicly made an arsehole of.

These terse e-mails concerned documents. Jesus, these people love their documents. Mostly it concerned how the documents sent on the 3rd February were, in laymans terms, a fucking abortion.

And when I looked at these, there was not a doubt, not one doubt in my mind, that I had absolutely fuck all to do with creating these documents. The immediate giveaway, a dead ringer, was this habit of coming off the shift key a fraction too late and writing things like BEst regards. Regularly. I don't do this. I do not.

But I know someone who does.

So, sez I : "I didn't write these documents."

The Boss : "Well your names all over the e-mails!"

Here's me : "Yes. But I didn't send these."

The Boss : "Well you must have done!"

Even as I'm speaking, I'm looking at the calendar, and then flipping to my diary, and slowly becoming incredibly, unbelievably calm. Yes.

I did not send these, because on the day when they were sent, I was in London.

Now, let me condense what has happened here. I usually send these docs each week, but on the day/week in question, I was in London. So The Boss had to send them. And, for whatever reasons, you may speculate freely, the utterly half-assed (I mean, really, seriously badly half-assed) attempts at said documents, she sent them from my e-mail address, on my computer.

So I very calmly, probably smiling a little, replied to this effect :

"Dear all,
Apologies for any inconvenience caused but I must advise that there appears to be some error here; at the time of sending of these documents I was out of the country on business and so can only assume some mistake has been made. Please advise if I can assist further."

Yes, "reply-to-all", of course.

And then I watched, with a certain amount of enjoyment, The Boss's jaw hit the desk about thirty seconds later.

So I acted very innocent and pointed no fingers, and The Boss hurriedly then replied-to-all to explain that she had made an oversight and had worked at my desk briefly and e-mailed said documents from there for convenience, apologies all round.

None of these people are stupid, bear that in mind.

Anyway. Naturally this turned about as wise as painting a big day-glo bullseye on my forehead, but hey, I think those involved will remember this little episode for a while.

The curve is headed now to the median point and this could be considered the highlight of my day.