The Rules of Bureaucracy

Over the last few months, my long-lost friend Debbie has been feeding me odds and ends she thinks would be useful for my blog. Some are things I've already seen, some are new, and some are - frankly - a bit in excess of the PG rating I try to maintain here (since my children, nieces, and nephews read this blog, too).

This morning, since I need to get my wide, pasty-white backside in gear and get checked out of the hotel so I can spend a few more hours with Dad before heading home, I thought I'd dip into The Debbie File and share one of her offerings with you.

If you've never had to deal with a massive and opaque government bureaucracy before, you're very fortunate. But if you do have to do it, remember these ten rules that drive bureaucracies:

1. Preserve thyself.

2. It is easier to fix the blame than to fix the problem (see Congress for a prime example).

3. A penny saved is an oversight.

4. Information deteriorates upward.

5. The first 90% of the task takes 10% of the time; the last 10% takes the other 90%.

6. Experience is what you get just after you need it.

7. For any given large, complex, hard-to-understand, expensive problem, there exists at least one short, simple, easy, cheap wrong answer (government bailouts?).

8. Anything that can be changed will be, until time runs out.

9. To err is human; to shrug is civil service.

10. There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over.

For really good parodies of mindless bureaucracy, I can recommend two classics: the administrative offices of Hell as depicted in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's recently-reprinted update of Dante's Inferno; and the marvelous and hysterically funny song Antrag auf Erteilung eines Antragsformulars by German folk singer Reinhard Mey. Mey's song is the story of a fellow who spends days being shunted from office to office in search of a special form he's been told he needs to submit to his local government office...only to find out in the end that all the stocks of the forms are being destroyed because they're superfluous and no one ever needs them for anything. Someday when I have time, I'll post a translation of the lyrics to go with the YouTube video I linked to above so you can enjoy it if you don't speak any German.

And now it's time for me to deal with the Best Western bureaucracy, pay my bill, and hit the road. See you in the morning.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo