The Secondary Cow-orker is coming along nicely. One of our workmates was the frequent victim of the Cow-orker's shaky grasp of social skills ("I called him an arsehole, and now he won't help me with anything!"), and now the Secondary Cow-orker is following that tradition by attacking the same workmate at every opportunity and then blaming him for the resulting disharmony in the workplace.
Over the last couple of weeks, everything has become this hapless staff member's fault: typos that he and the Secondary Cow-orker, and a third person have failed to catch, the reason that a Word document won't open normally, simple miscommunications.
Cow-orkerism, it seems, is a progressive condition.
Meeting with the Cow-orker. Argh. Knowing ahead of time that she won't listen to a word I say (Marketing's current motto is "We only listen to what we tell each other our clients think") I've brought in a white board so I can draw pictures for her.
I open my mouth and get one word out.
"I know what you're trying to say, but that's not going to work."
Wow, she has psychic powers now!
On to the whiteboard. Short of crash-tackling me (which I'm not totally prepared to rule out), there's not much she can do to interrupt me sketching out a diagram. So she sits there and shouts at me about why I'm wrong, and why I'm not understanding the big picture.
I summarise the big picture for her. She agrees, grudgingly, that I can see the big picture and then shouts at me some more.
"But that's not how you work! You only think you work that way! I'm not authorised to let you do that!" (So why the hell did you come to this meeting, then, when you know that's what we wanted to talk about?) "No, no, no! That's all wrong! That's not how your unit works at all!"
And this is the essence of the Cow-orker's argument: it wasn't like that when she was still working here (which, in realistic terms, was nine months ago) and she's having trouble (again) accepting that we've moved on with the changes we weren't able to implement while she was still here. So because she can't conceive of things being different, any suggestions based on those differences are necessarily wrong because they don't conform to her version of reality.
It must be very liberating being a sociopath.
"The Marketing Shrew won't let you do this!" the Cow-orker foams.
"The Marketing Shrew doesn't know what we do, and didn't consult with is before she made these decisions."
"But I told her how things work."
A-ha. Now we know why the Marketing Shrew won't let us do this.
Things go into a death spiral from there. By an astonishing coincidence, by the time the meeting is over I have a blinding headache and the meeting has resolved nothing.
The Fifth Wiggle has been offered a redundancy package. Marketing are now headless in fact as well as function, although it's unlikely we'll see any difference in their performance.
