Saturday, April 8, 2017

Eventually they will give up and move on: chalk another one up for The King of Inertia...

Gilbert Frank, Passive-Aggressive Government Bureaucrat...
There was a new memorandum emailed to us today, outlining a change in one of our policies. So I did what I always do: I sent an email reply asking for further clarification. It will take weeks before i get a response, and when I DO get a response? You got it: I email back that I need further clarification on the clarification. I can do this for months, even years. Eventually they will give up and move on: chalk another one up for The King of Inertia...
Sometimes, though, I like to shake it up a bit, just to keep things fresh. In these cases I will purposely misunderstand the memorandum, and then send out one email after another misdirecting my fellow employees. You send enough emails, no one can keep up: the People Above respond to the first one, but that was now already six emails ago: I don't have time to look back, there are more emails to send...
For fun, I will occasionally omit people on a Reply on an email chain. Then, a few emails later, I will add them back on. Now they are confused, and the email chain devolves into people trying to figure out what is going on...
A variation on this is to 'cc' someone who has nothing to do with the subject. Now that person gets involved, and sidetracks the entire conversation, trying to figure out why they are now included. I always 'cc' the nervous types: they panic, thinking they are being set up for failure, and -- you got it -- they then send a LOT of emails....
It's funny, watching the nervous ones who fear failure. They haven't learned that there is no such thing as Failure for a Government Employee. You simply say I must have missed that memorandum and today is a New Day...


I am Laslo.



1 comment:

  1. Sweet Jesus, this is such a perfect description of life inside a public bureaucracy. I've email scenarios such as this play out 100s of times.

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