Ahhh, Bureaucracy

I work in an engineering environment. I am not an engineer, but I am a member of the, I guess you could call it the support staff. We are in the same building as the people who manufacture the things the engineers engineer. Until recently, I was one of the people doing the manufacturing. I guess you could say I switched sides.

When you are in manufacturing, and you come across a problem with a design, or have an idea on how to make a design better, you have to submit it in writing to the engineering staff. Then they review it, and if they agree, they implement the change. Sounds simple enough, right? Okay, sounds simple enough and boring, right?

Wrong. At least, on the simple part. This process can take up to 9 months. For something as simple as changing from Phillip's head screws to Flathead screws. That's because something like 15 different people have to see it before it can get approved. Some of them even get to see it twice. And the best part is, you get almost no feedback when you submit one of these change requests. So you just have to sit back, twiddle your thumbs, and hope for the best.

I used to be one of the submitters. Now I'm one of the 15. It's interesting, how being on the other side can change your perspective sometimes. Seeing what the other half has to go through can make a big difference on your opinion of how things work.

Not that that's the case this time. This time, now having seen both sides of the issue, it turns out my first impressions were right. The 15 are just a bunch of guys who don't really care about the manufacturing people, and unless they get poked (preferably with a sharp stick) they just sit on stuff, sometimes until they die.

Now you may be saying to yourself, "But Nook, aren't you one of the 15 now? Couldn't you be the change you want to see in others?" And you'd be right. I could. But it's a lot easier to just sit on stuff like everybody else. Besides, I don't want to be the one guy who does everything really well.

That has 2 negative impacts. One, everybody will start looking dirty at me and give me the really hard shoulder bump which is just mean and hurts a lot, because I'm showing them up and potentially pointing out the fact that they aren't doing their job. Second, the reward for a doing your work well is typically more work.

See, management types don't like having to ask their employees 5 times a day, "Did you get this done yet? When are you going to get this done? Why didn't you get this done by the time you just told me you would have it done?" So when they find that special guy who can work independent of supervision and really gets things done, they load him up. Also, they try their best to hide him from the world, so no one else finds out about him and tries to promote him.

Of course, I'm saying him in the gender non-specific sense, since everybody knows that those management types would prefer a woman over a man, since they could pay her less.