18th July, 2003.
The psychotic episode (hers, not mine) that's been building all week finally blew this afternoon.
Our manager is absent on a training course, and the Cow-orker has been wandering without direction for most of the day, alternating between lecturing her workmates about how lucky they are to be working here (unfortunately she's going through one of her periods of heightened awareness as to how difficult it is to sack people that work in our Department), and instructing them to watch corporate videos to raise their awareness about what we do here. And then abruptly the Cow-orker appears to forget about what a great place this is to work and explodes into a tirade about how our manager is Satan.
And it's not a quiet tirade - even though she's talking to one of the sympathetic office hot-heads, she still feels the need to practically scream her complaints about everything she can think of to make sure her audience is left in no doubt that they should not even attempt to defend our boss. What quickly becomes interesting is the gulf between reality on Planet Cow-orker and the reality the rest of us live in.
Planet Cow-orker: "He always talks over me and interrupts me!"
Planet Earth: There is no other way to engage her in conversation if you want the discussion to be either relevant or concluded before the next ice age.Planet Cow-orker: "He spies on me and monitors my phone calls!"
Planet Earth: No, he (along with everyone else in the office) can't get away from your bellowed conversations down the telephone about every aspect of your personal and semi-professional life.Planet Cow-orker: "He asks me the same questions again and again to intimdate and patronise me!"
Real World: Because that's what it takes to get a straight answer out of your woolly-headed, iron-boned skull when you won't actually answer the question the person is asking you even when the answer is "yes" or "no".And she rants.
And rants.
And continues to rant.
And then our manager returns, and suddenly it's like watching one of those old Jekyll and Hyde movies where a visitor arrives and Hyde scrabbles frantically around in the next room for the potion that will turn him back into kindly, repressed Dr Jekyll.
Never work with anyone who boasts about how they once annoyed a workmate so much that the other person was driven to threatening actual physical violence to make them shut up. The Cow-orker considers "bantering" to be synonymous with "provoking to murderous rage" when she tells the story, and still fails to understand why her victim refuses to sit in the same room as her.
I found myself contemplating hiding her cold and flu medicine today in the hope that she'd start to collapse and have to be rushed off to hospital... Or, really, rushed anyplace that I wasn't.
You know what's ironic? If I were to bludgeon her to death with office furniture to make her shut up, I'd be considered the criminal.