I Gave It To You To Give To Him

My Dear Fellow,

I don't really "do" things in my current job. It's a very strange position to be in. My job is more like a mediator at a family therapy session, relaying messages from one aggrieved party to another.

WOMAN 1: Tell Tracy that I'm not talking to her until she takes back that thing she said about our Sharon that time.
WOMAN 2: Tell Cheryl that I could say a sight more about Sharon, aye, 'appen I could an' all.
WOMAN 1: Ooooh!

So it's like that. Only instead of Tracy and Cheryl we've got the various IT teams. They sit mere desks apart, but there must have been a falling-out some years ago that we none of us talk about anymore. Because I get lots of emails asking me to request that we set up a VPN with an sFTP connection via the CD Secure Gateway which is only on server QWERTYUIOP.

ME: Eh? Can't YOU just tell them that? Because what you said sounded like a random selection of meaningless vowel sounds to me.
DEVELOPER: I can't do that. For I am as unpredictable as the WIND...!

So I get to spend a lot of my time asking people to do things I don't understand. And then I get the follow-up questions.

DEVELOPER: Has Tony set up the parallax auto-distributor with a triple axel and flip?
ME: Maybe. I asked him to do the thing you asked me to ask him to do.
DEVELOPER: But did he remember to adjust for cavitation?
ME: Oh, I expect so.

All this makes me feel quite insecure. Or at least it would, if not for the fact that when it goes BANG in production then a "production incident" gets raised and then the technical people HAVE to talk to each other to fix it within the agreed timescales.

Of course, they COULD avoid all this unnecessary heartache by talking to each other in the first place. But then I'd be out of a job, and that would never do.

That has nothing to do with my picture which is of the snicket behind our flat. I liked the wallflowers and the sunbeams bouncing off it at the end of another day of wondering if they'll notice when I leave in 6 week's time.

Parsones