A brief rant

Bureaucracy: a condition under which a person attempting to do something productive is frequently interrupted by strangers with fancy titles, all demanding to know what he's doing, how he's doing it, why he's doing it that way, when will he be done and why is it taking so long. Said interrupters are required to call at different times, frequently within minutes of each other, until the tasked person can recite by heart all the things they 'need to know.'

At some point, the phone stops ringing long enough to let the worker get something done, at which point the cycle repeats with calls for a "progress update." Reusing an efficient email summary may cut down on the elapsed time of each individual call, but at the cost of more frequent calls as the email gets passed around to other erstwhile strangers who inevitably have 'more questions.'

I've never gotten around to reading Dante's Inferno, but I suspect one of the levels of hell fits this description.


(/rant) I feel much better now...