Choc-o-Lardiac Arrest wrote:
StrongRad wrote:
My job makes me want to destroy the world.
First off, believe it or not, bureaucracy can serve a good, useful purpose.
Most of the time, though, it only exists for bureaucracy's sake.
Today, I experienced the latter form.
It took me ALL day to draft a letter. OK, so it only actually took me about 20 minutes to draft the letter, it took me the rest of the day to get it into "the correct format".
The indent was one space too far (even though I used a tab), there was one extra character return below the inside address, it needed another one above the address line... It just keeps going on and on and on.
To make matters worse, they were only finding one problem at a time (instead of pointing out everything, or almost everything, the first time they looked at it), then they kept belittling me for "trying to be creative instead of following our style manual and the example" they gave me.
2 problems: 1) I did not have this style manual. Any time I asked for it, I was told "It's on the y: drive". To realize how absurd that statement is, you must understand that our entire division (including 9 field offices) use this network drive and it is one of the least organized drives ever (sometimes it takes 20 minutes to find things that YOU put on there), and nobody seemed able to have a guide they could email me.
2) I DID follow the example letter they gave me (and it was wrong, per their precious style guide).
Eventually, I got it all worked out. It took all day and the finished product (printed about 4:25) looked almost identical to the first product I printed out at 8:30 this morning. If one were to measure with a ruler, they'd be able to barely discern a difference, but the casual viewer (and the recipient) wouldn't know they two were different.
Go above their heads and deliver/e-mail it yourself next time. Bureaucracy is about filing and proccessing numbers and forms that every one needs filed in order to run their daily lives, but instead of being a mindless drone when doing it, TAKE ACTION! FREE THE BEAST! Knock someone out with your hole puncher, kick in someones teeth with a coffee mug-foot-ware, and be the best damn bureaucrat you can be! If they can't handle it, you're in for elsewhere!
Believe me when I say this: I thought about doing something like this, I really did.
However, I value my job (well, ok, I value the pittance of a paycheck they give me), and I value my not-in-jailness.
The person that signed the letter (our director) thought I was joking when I told him everything I'd gone through. His response: "They're not going to look at that letter. All they care about is the revision package we're sending them. We told them we'd have it in their hands by the end of February. The letter could be nothing but a long string of swears and they'd never know... By the way, don't do the swears thing."
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