Don't blame me...

All around us are people saying don't blame me for the near collapse of the economy, don't blame me for the weather. Well there is a difference between things you can change and things you can't and there is also a case for blaming people who cannot see the consequences of their own actions.

Some people - politicans spring to mind - either just do not see where they have gone wrong or just as likely, know full well and want to shift the blame to some other schmuck.

The following incident may seem trivial but it illustrates the arrogance of assumng a puzzled expression and then staring accusingly at somebody else when you know you have just screwed up.

I have reached the epilogue of my wage-slave career by signing up to do 12 days of work over 3 months for my recently ex-employer which means on one day a week of my choosing I make my way with the rest of the depressed lemmings to Islington and spend the day "in dark-filled rooms". Yesterday being one such day started well enough but in the middle of the morning my computer went on the blink and connection to the server was broken. Not by co-incidence a contractor from the IT firm that is supposed to serve us was in the building messing around with a security upgrade for the 4 or 5 laptops a few of the staff use.

Having found this out I ran him to ground appropriately enough in the basement. It was quite a weird feeling to walk into this over-heated noisy replica of the engine room of the Starship Enterprise and see the contractor hooked up to the Borg machine with a cable from his laptop into the bowels of the mainframe. After some difficulty making myself heard I told him that that it was no coincidence that his presence "deus ex machina" had bu*gered the whole system. He shrugged his shoulders and said "I haven't noticed anything." Not being too long on patience I carefully explained to him that there is no such thing as coincidence, which is at best a futile attempt to avoid acceptance that consequence always follows cause and would he please extract his head from his rear USB and sort it out. Having actually forced myself all the way from home to office I was in no mood to sit around all day picking my nose whilst it occurred to him to actually look at what he had done.

I left him to it. Had an early lunch. Read the paper. Went into the database..Nothing happened.

Then I found another man who was also from the IT firm sitting out of sight in a meeting room probably playing Sudoku. 'Don't blame me, I'm just a senior executive, I'm not an engineer.'

A few seconds later his ears aflame and the seat of his trousers in need of a fire extinguisher he catapuluted himself into a lift and disappeared in the general direction of the basement.

An hour later the first man (don't blame me, I didn't do it) made the mistake of failing to use a different route which would not have taken him past my desk. He looked like a man whose last 20 years had been spent trying to find his way out of a paper bag. The blank expresion on his face and glazed eyes should have warned me not to bother but I said "Well?" Avoiding direct eye-contact he mumbled something about (don't blame me) "there's a hardware problem." Fighting the urge to tell him that there would be a hardware problem in the Casualty Dept when they tried to remove my boot from a very uncomfortable part of his anatomy, I asked him to answer yes or no, can you fix what you broke?

Now there could have been a selection of innocuous answers to my question such as - I will do my best or I'm sorry but it is going to take longer but the answer he pulled out of the box was "Don't blame me, it's a hardware problem." My hands weren't actually pried from his throat by a dozen panicked work colleagues but his squeaks of puzzled self-pity could be heard in the distant basement where his colleague was no doubt hiding. Having firmly and for me very quietly laid out for him a graphic scenario of his probable exit from this mortal coil if he didn't start taking the problem seriously I then told him he would be locked in with the Borg machine and fed only stale bread and water until he corrected HIS cock-up.

An hour later a colleague told me sheepishly that the IT geniuses had left the building (presumably via the ventilation duct) and that a new server had been ordered and would arrive by courier the following day. Furthermore the IT firm's top man would install it. Bloody glad I won't be there till next week - I bet the "top man" says don't blame me as soon as he walks into the building.

Apianus