There are quite a few downsides to living in Catholic Bavaria. Stores are closed on Sundays (but not all of them). There's no dancing or playing of "joyful" music allowed on either Good Friday or some other Day of Remembrance of the Dead. Until recently it was illegal to wash your car on Sunday. The upshot is a bunch of extra holidays. I had Friday and Monday free, four days to finally process a load of photos in Canon utilities and Photoshop and deliver them.

Which is harder to do when your primary monitor (a colour-calibrated NEC MultiSync FE950) dies. And shops are closed. Finding a CRT locally is nigh impossible these days so I'm going to pay a lot for that muffler. So instead of Photoshop I was stuck building furniture, carrying boxes, and doing all that other crap you have to do when you've moved into a new flat.

Still, the break was nice. Two 4-day work weeks coming on the heels of a two-week "vacation", with four days free in between. I could get used to a schedule like that.

Most of our other orifices were open at least one of those two days and the Asians were there for both. There was a load of mail to read. Why the hell would $AsiaManager be writing me about my $HugeKoreanKorp ticket? I'd already answered it fully while also letting them add milk and eggs. There wasn't really much more to do.

REC,

FYI, I have reassigned ticket AT-115EG-K to $DumbChimp and added you as an assist since you were out both fri and today as well. Hope this is ok

No, it is fucking not OK! I know a lot of OK things and reassigning my specialty I18N ticket to a clueless n00b is definitely not one of them.

$AsiaManager,

I don't believe that reassignment was the correct action. It was, in fact, wholly inappropriate and as such was one of the most incorrect actions possible. $DumbChimp should've been added as an assist. I resolved the problem in my last update; $DumbChimp merely confirmed and held the customer's hand afterwards. Making matters worse, the answer he sent is wrong. Left alone, $HugeKoreanKorp will be fucked since they've mixed Unicode and codepage.

Love,
REC

And the response, 20 minutes later:

REC, Sorry, the full details were not in the ticket. Typically I request backup help instead of new owner. The TAR requested reassignment of this ticket to an Asia region monkey, preferably Korean speaking since this is a new customer and they are already on the "Special Case" list. I could not get a Korean speaking monkey so I compromised with having APAC monkey picked it up At that point of reassignment, I have considered that this is a new ticket that you have just picked up, you were out for two days and since the customer needs handholding in APAC time and Korean, I decide to go for reassignment and I was not aware the SR would be resolved so quickly.

So the reason you violated our policies again and stole my ticket again to hand off to one of your incompetent chimps again was to get a Korean speaker working on the issue (which had already been resolved), but the clueless 'tard whose numbers need propping up neither speaks Korean nor understands anything about this issue. Nevertheless he gave $HugeKoreanKorp a follow-up answer which couldn't have been more wrong if it had been, "Masturbating with a high-suction Hoover canister vacuum is a perfectly safe and healthy pasttime."

Ticket unstolen. Urgent update mail sent to $HugeKoreanKorp with a CC: to my managers and a BCC: to $DumbChimp.

Fuckwittery is like gangrene or that black mold you get on damp walls. By the time you've actually discovered it, it's too late and probably impossible to get rid of. And it's everywhere. Don't forget to pay for your hot dogs in Kansas. Civilisation is truly in decline.