Want to know how to make Chuck figuratively jump through all kinds of bureaucratic hoops and prepare reams of multi-pronged backup documentation for weeks, and eventually forcing a Thunderdome-style brawl between different branches of the financial department to simply get an answer, any answer, so that a critical organizational program gets the support it needs? Need to know how to drive Chuck to the breaking point, resulting in numerous pleas for guidance from those in power to determine which faction is correct, all unanswered?

Do what one office in my organization’s finance department did: Approve an IT budget for this fiscal year last January, and not consult the IT department about it, even though we went through all the rigramole and red tape, including all the new documentation to support departmental needs, and then tell no one, including senior management and the people in charge of administering it, leading weeks of fighting over at least three different conclusions about why one particular, relatively inexpensive program (which Chuck happened to be tasked with documenting and shepherding through the approval process) didn’t get the proper funding attached to it!

It shouldn’t be this hard, but when your organizational culture is poisoned by the inertia caused past-their-prime petty bureaucrats (who are often cast-offs from the competent agency a few miles up the interstate) who can’t follow their own policy, but constantly wield it like a club to stymie others just trying to do the job, it’s what you get.

I am, of course, glad to have a job that pays the mediocre bucks in this economy and this era of human history, but I just wish that the people I have to work with could stop screwing with the system long enough to see beyond their sad little fiefdoms and get the damned work done.

It doesn’t have to be this hard. We all know that in the end, someone will find the resources at the 11th hour (in this lowly corner of the public sector, the amounts we’re throwing around are trivial rounding errors anyway), so why play all the damned games, hiding and burying things under red tape or in banana stands having nothing to do with the organization’s primary mission, only to magically make them appear at the last minute, just to highlight your paltry, inconsequential authority?

Because, I suppose, they can.