I have declared war

on the clueless bitch who functions as the administrator of our office. I used to think she was a sweet girl if a little stupid. I didn't mind dealing with her. I could understand that I am scary - I'm older, have seen and done it all twice, am highly self sufficient and rarely bother with her. I was sensitive to this and would try to ask her for help now and then, be nice to her, chat with her, etc., so she wouldn't think I was stuck up or didn't like her. But now, I really don't like her. Apparently now feels threatened enough by me to need to "assert herself" by being a pain in my ass simply because she can. Okay honey, I used to think you were sweet and dumb, now I think you're dumb and a pain in my ass. You are on my very short but intense shit list, and this is not going to be fun for you.

The short version of the saga - I had a document management issue and I needed a solution. So I designed one, shopped it around, found a dirt cheap vendor for the software, and - here's where it got ugly - asked her how we would go about getting it.

You can't. We can't use outside software.

I'm thinking, Oh horseshit, everything we HAVE is from an outside vendor!

I'm saying, "Why is this?"

Because the IT department has to approve it.

I'm thinking, I have never had a problem dealing with the IT department, I know the guy I have to ask, he's actually quite helpful. If he reviews it I'm sure there will be no problem. If there's a problem, I will enlist his help to figure out how to do what I need.

I say, "Okay, so we can ask him about it."

Ohmygod, apparently it's a mortal sin to ask the IT department to approve software! She acted like I was suggesting running naked through the next board meeting, and proceeded to jump in my path and suggest a variety of alternatives, all of which I had investigated and rejected last summer because they Fucking Did Not Work. I told her I'd been down that path before, without using the word fucking, and she argued with me and said she would "talk to" them about it. I'm like, Okay, you don't even understand the document management issue though I have described it for months, and now you are going to talk to the vendors I've already talked to, and who told me right up front they couldn't do it?

She refused to believe that her idea didn't work.

This escalated in the past 48 hours to her arranging a "conference" with Boss, the real boss, and herself - excluding me from a discussion of my own fucking document management system.

So I cut her off at the knees, pulled the boss aside, showed him what I wanted, and he said go ahead and get it. We discussed the IT dept issue, I said I was pretty sure there would be no problem but if there is I'll figure out a work around. He said, "Cool." The entire exchange took, oh, three and a half minutes. I've been fighting the idiot I'm supposed to go to for these things for this for months.

Normally, though I am outspoken I am nice and cooperative, and I would not have gone around her if she hadn't forced me to.

There are other political things in the works which have made the need to hit the emergency eject button ever more apparent. This was just a very petty example of the very petty idiocy that keeps me from efficiently performing my job, which is actually managing and analyzing voluminous discovery in multimillion dollar complex litigation. I LOVE my job. I HATE where I'm doing it. I hate the petty bean-counting halfwits who are obsessed with the TPS cover sheet du jour because their little pea brains can't wrap around anything more complicated. It's SO Dilbert, it's terrifying. And I am in Career Limbo, a division of Heck. (If you recognize that one you are a true Dilbert Dweeb like me.)

Boss was in on this exchange with the clueless idiot, and he totally agreed that she's a useless obstructionist and definitely intentionally cut me out of dealing with my own project by insisting that SHE had to talk to him and our boss, leaving me out. So I have backup in raising this issue with management. And I will.

I would like to be able to stick around there to see our handful of really big complex cases to resolution, because I have a lot of myself invested in them. And I won't abandon Boss to deal with them alone. But I have reached the "tell it like it is to anybody," stage. They need me more than I need them, and I'm too old and crabby to put up with this shit.

And I have decided that there is no reason I can't take to my bed with my television and the top-down cardigan, even if it's only 6:30. Because no matter what Murphy says, there are no rules.