Mar 5

 Somewhat useful today at work. Nothing groundbreaking. But. Useful enough.

I have headache - yet again - that is possibly even a baby migraine. Same place. Same feel. Just not progressing. Yet. There may even be something of a link between them and working. Concentrating on the screen. Iffy eyes. Eh. Meh.

Today I got to meet the young neighbours new dog. I had caught sight of them a few times with what looked like a small dog. And today whilst in the kitchen I saw them properly and so went out to be social. A pupper. 11 weeks old. Not quite old enough to go out yet - waiting for the parvo shots to properly kick in. A beautiful little lab / poodle cross. A lovely little thing. We had a chat for a while all about dogs and gardens and walks. It was nice. Dogs will do that. Break the social ice. Make strangers chat to each other. Just one of their amazing skills. 

As I am - kinda - feeling a bit better of late. Better being very relative. I have decided to pencil in a visit down to the office next week. To chat about techstack and approach and yada. And mainly have an opportunity to start a subtle curtail of one of our devs charging off on his own without an eye to the bigger picture. I am hopeful I can manage to pull this off, even though it is a lot. I'm making a whole bunch of assumptions here about how I feel and how I am doing. But we shall see.

Spoke to my friend last night. Ended up in something of a near argument with him. About his work. Difficult. He continually has issues with staff treating him with contempt, of staff fucking up or not doing their jobs, and he fails to correct it or even more properly chastise them. And then is perplexed why it continues. In defending his basically, pathologically set destructive ways, the conversation got heated. I should have known. People do not like being shifted out of their comfort zones. In a string of cockups, the most recent one was an employee saying she knew what she was doing, not heeding my friends concerns, and buying a whole bunch of new computers for the office that in less than 12 months ended up useless. Because they couldn't be upgraded to windows 11. She had fucked up. Cost the charity money. And had to buy another set all over again.

The consequence ?

Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero.

And then he wonders why she continues to fuck up and play it off like its no big thing or all my friends fault.

He says he cannot discipline them because he feels mean. So he wont. Ever. He also says he cant discipline them, because, if down that process he had to fire one, he would have no one to replace them. Despite this being obviously stupidly untrue. One of them is just the office manager.

Based in Oxford he should have no shortage of people able to do that job.

Then another excuse.

Can't afford to hire someone else competent.

Sigh.

It ends up just a bunch of excuses as to why he needs to continue on in his dysfunctional way.

Pointing any of this stuff out just makes the conversation heated.

He doesn't like change. He doesn't like managing people. He cannot bear upsetting someone.

A terrible manager in short. Which he acknowledges. But refuses to see any way in which he could improve.

But. This is about normal for the human condition. Pretty much everyone gets stuck in some dysfunction of their own making that they "cannot possibly get out of". It is part of being human. We get to a place where we do not want to go any further and invent reasons why that's the case that have nothing to do with logic or capability, and everything to do with justifying irrationality.

I think the smarter a species gets, the more mentally unstable it becomes. There's a theory for you. Intelligence x crazy scale.