I'm Not Used to Being Treated Politely

Last day at work before sliding into The Chair. People are treating me oddly.

One woman in education would not leave me alone for a month. Every day it was a problem with this, or so and so is having trouble with his e-mail, can you look at it real quick? Finally, the order came down from above: no one bothers Toby until his Big Project is done, not for trifling little foo-foo problems, not for anything that isn't a major problem.

So today, as I'm installing software as part of the Big Project in someone's office, I see her outside, circling the water, glancing furtively through the half-open door at me, much the same way a shark would size up a swimmer before it's decided it wants to tackle the extra crunchiness of his SCUBA tank.

I finish up and head out the door. "Yeah?" I ask her. I leave off saying "whaddayawant?" in a thick Brooklyn accent. She just stares at me. Silence. "You wanted to see me?" I ask again. "No. I was waiting for you to finish to I could talk to Sue."

I was installing my software on Sue's PC. In Sue's office. And without hesitation, I apologized and got out of there before she started pelting me with more of her problems.

I didn't make it.

Another women in the same department calls me every two days with some problem that AOL is giving her. I kind of want to ask her if she's having so much trouble with AOL, why she doesn't just complain to them instead of me.

But here's the funny part. She doesn't even bother reading her error messages anymore before calling me.

So this afternoon, a mere hour away from freedom and less than a day away from The Hook, she calls me. "AOL is bouncing our mails again," she informs me. She is using another person's phone line, possibly because she thinks I'm deliberately trying to avoid her. She's a sneaky one. I guess this goes to show that you can never completely trust an Australian. (They're all descended from thieves and cut-purses, you know.) So in this heavy Aussie tongue, I just hear her pour out the syllables. "Eh Oh Ale is beouncing hour meals eh-gihn."

Gotta love her. I fixed this problem last month. I have the fax to prove it.

So I ask her, precisely, what the message says. But since she's not at her own desk, this is a problem. She vows to call me back. A second later, my phone rings. The display reads the call as coming from another extension. We know now that her phone isn't broken.

I told you she was sneaky.

Next comes the part where I ask her again to read me the contents of the message, the alleged bounce message from AOL. Not only do I get her reading off the actual text, but I get her commentary on that text as well. It's like a DVD extra to a movie I never wanted to go see.

"Something about 'the following message could not be delivered due to a fatal error', which it wasn't. 'The host said: the following username or mailbox does not exist.' It does."

First of all, lady, that's not "AOL is bouncing our mail again". That's you sending a message to a nonexistent AOL address. Second of all, where do you get off knowing which AOL addresses exist and which don't? Because seriously, there are a bunch of spammers out that who would pay you good money to know what you know.

Of course, it turns out that someone gave her a bad address, and there really isn't anything SMTP servers can do about that. Running qmail means that my mail server always does The Right Thing, even if it means crabby Aussies won't bother to read the contents of their own bounce messages.

She apologized and wished me luck on my impending slice and dice. What a nice woman.