$MONEY*3$

PonyGirl isn't a real employee with my company, he's a external support tech that has a contract with us -  he pretty much runs his own small business from within our office. It's a win win; he gets to use our space for his other clients, and if something explodes on our end, he's here just in case. He serves as a safety net for me, in case something weird comes out.

At least, most of the time.

---

Me: "One of the Sydney users is having this annoying problem, keeps on coming up, do you-"
PonyGirl: "Don't care."
Me: "Oh...er..."
PonyGirl: "I haven't been paid in 2 weeks. I'm owed $55,000."
Me: "Oh. Er...going to play golf?"
PonyGirl: "Yup, cya!"

---

The $55,000 isn't just salary, it includes computer hardware, software, labour costs, etc. He buys the equipment with an implict understanding that we'll pay him back within a week to cover the costs - unfortunately, office politics over who controls our cashflow have been getting in the way.

Worst part? It's not the record, the previous amount owed was over $80,000.

Blacklists are racists!

So, it's getting towards the end of the tax year, which means that everyone is trying to look busy / make sales to inflate their figures - no doubt to avoid the giant cut that's incoming. To this end, we're starting to increase our outgoing catalogues - essentially an image detailing all our specials, products, etc etc.

Getting this made is a major hassle - people are exporting from Publisher 03, for christ's sake - and e-mailing it out has turned into a bigger problem. For some reason, they don't tell IT about any of this, even though they know (or at least, were told) that it can be a big drain if it's done incorrectly.

---

*ring ring*

OldOfficeLady: "Everyone's net is slow!"

Me: "Oh ok, yea I'm noticing it too, um, let me chec-"

OldOfficeLady: "Is it the batch emails?"

Me: "......batch emails?"

OldOfficeLady: "HumanBlob got me to send out 3000 emails in batches of 50"

Me: "That's...ok, I guess, what was in the email?"

OldOfficeLady: "1mb attachment, that's ok though isn't it?"

Me: "..."

---

Turns out there's 1200 messages in the mail queue and a whole bunch of bandwidth raping. I have no doubt that we will end up on some blacklists very, very soon. Again.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Well, that was scary.

Thankfully, no-one knew about the blog. To be sure, I locked it for a few weeks, and only people I had added could see it. I've convinced the RandomSydneyUser that the blog doesn't actually exist - that it was just a bunch of emails I sent to some friends (which, of course, is how it all started). Combined with avoiding the subject at all with PonyGirl, I think I've convinced people that it's just a silly prank.

Crisis averted!

In the downtime, I still collected my horror stories, so I'll be slowly filling in the blanks. In the meantime, I'll backdate this post, and keep the flow somewhat normal.

We now return you to your scheduled misery.

OH SHIT

FUCK

FUUUUUCCCKK

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Random Sydney User: "Blahblahblah, thanks for fixing for my problem.......so, whats the address to CapsLock?"
Me: "...huh?"
RSU: "Caps lock address! You know!"
Me: "The fuck you on about.............wait.............."

RSU: "Yea, PonyGirl told me about it!" (PonyGirl saw the Blogspot editor page a couple of weeks ago while I was adding stories. Didn't see anything, the site was locked at the time, but still saw the name)
Me: "Er.......ummmmm..........not sure what you're on about?"
RSU: "Right right, just email it to me then!" (I could feel the *wink* through the phone line)

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FUCK

(p.s. Not April's Fools!)