mustventmustventmustventmustventmustventmustvent

There seem to be a lot of bureaucratic jobs out there. People shuffling papers around and about, sending them to and fro, ostensibly with a goal in mind of accomplishing some task. Sometimes that task is helping someone else get something done. Somehow, though, there are cases in which the metric by which success is measured morphs from “how helpful was this drone in accomplishing the assignment” to something completely orthogonal, like “how tidy is your desk” or “minimize the number of typos on your forms.” Unfortunately, those goals can be best achieved by doing no work at all. If success means “not getting into trouble,” then you’re motivated to always say, “no,” and if one way of doing the chore doesn’t get you into trouble, you insist on always doing it that way, even if the rules say other approaches are just fine. The hammer works, so every problem will be a nail.

On a completely unrelated note (wink, wink), I just found out that I won’t be going to an IEEE conference next week. It was very surreal, like I was in a scene from Dr. Strangelove. I fell afoul of a doomsday device — a hidden policy. And, as Dr. Strangelove tells us, the whole point of the doomsday policy is lost if you keep it a secret! The really annoying thing is that had I known about this bureaucratic mess beforehand it could have been avoided instead of surfacing three days before the trip, OR, I could have waved off on this trip and gone to DAMOP the week after. I flirted with the idea of going to both, but all that got me was a gin and tonic thrown in my face. Conferences are exhausting. Conferences back-to-back is suicide. (and, I should say, running back-to-back conferences is insane, but one of the DAMOP organizers is doing just that, as he’s running the IEEE conference as well. It would have been interesting to chart the frazzle factor)