Doomed

Happy holiday...

Just had a 'phone call from T.Aldous. The call was to find out what type of PC we should be buying. On the requisition form I'd specified a desktop. T.Aldous had checked with Pookie Schnakenberger in IT to get the price and he was told:

It's the wrong form, we don't use this one any more.

You have to supply plans showing the precise positions of the PCs in the libraries.

You can't have desktops, only towers.

My response was:

I spent half an hour searching the intranet for a more up-to-date form without success. That's primarily because since 1999 the search facility has been "coming soon." That's the work of the guys who reckon that we should let them create the web interface to the library catalogue and not buy something in that's working in over a hundred libraries across the world.

To be fair to T.Aldous, he doesn't give a monkey's what form we use. Such is the animosity between him and Pookie that he'd be happy for the requisition to be written on bog paper, wrapped around a brick and lobbed through her window.

Conkers. T.Aldous agreed.

The desktops have a smaller footprint: the screens can sit on the processor, they can't on a tower. T.Aldous seized upon this with some glee and rang off.

I've managed to keep my telephone number a secret from him for seven years; he's somehow managed to wheedle it from somebody. Sigh...