XPost: rec.arts.sf.written
On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 10:12:20 -0800, Dimensional Traveler
<
dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
On 1/5/2024 8:17 AM, Paul S Person wrote:
On Thu, 4 Jan 2024 17:33:14 -0600, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
xkcd: Range Safety
https://xkcd.com/2876/
I am fairly sure that I have never met a Range Danger Officer.
Or a Range Mischief Officer?
How about the government agency from a 1940s-50s era short story who's >purpose was to sabotage and slow down the rest of the government because
it had become too efficient and fast so the voters didn't have time to
give input on bills before they were made law? I remember one of the >specific examples was waxing a floor to the point where government >messengers would slip and fall, delaying their deliveries.
A year or two before I retired, the various bits of the IRS that used
the same chapter of the Internal Revenue Manual that we did got
together and decided to rewrite that chapter.
The goal being to actually make it usable with endless working aids
and SOPs and sticky notes and so on.
They were not allowed to do it. There was, it turned out, an office in
the IRS with its own chapter in the IRM and that chapter laid out how
the other chapters were to be written.
This, apparently, was to be as useless to the actual workers as
possible.
Instead, our group created a single computerized checklist that we
used instead. By the time I left it had not only the basic calls
covered, but about 30 special cases for us to identify and
instructions for how to handle them.
But it wasn't part of the IRM. Honor (or at least Stupidity) was
satisfied.
So the gummint agency you reference may not have been /entirely/
fictional. It may live on, at least in spirit.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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