#134 We Didn’t Choose to be Bureaucrats
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In terms of sheer tonnage, the United States it the world’s leading producer of weapons-grade bureaucracy. Nothing officially happens in this country until it’s been recorded on a complicated and mysteriously-named form, approved, counter-signed, and carried to its final resting place in a dusty filing cabinet. It’s not our fault, though. After all, the country was founded on a written document that was born in a committee, crafted by a series of votes, and signed by one guy who then turned it over to fifty-five of his friends so they could countersign it.
Building on that humble beginning, the United States has elevated bureaucracy to a art form. If bureaucracy were an Olympic event, the United States would be the hands-down winner in every competition. (Of course, given the difficulty involved in filling out the necessary “Permission to Train”, “Permission to Apply for Permission to Travel to the Site of Competition”, “Travel Pre-Authorization”, “Approval for Travel”, “Permission to Compete”, and “Permission for a Discrete Moment of Celebration Upon Achieving Victory” forms, we’d probably never have a competitor who actually made it to the games.)….
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NOTES:
- As I mentioned in the episode, this particular essay was inspired by a series of ‘Tweets’ from GrammarGirl. You can find her on-line at:
http://grammar.qdnow.com - I wanted to thank Greg over at Dancing with Elephants for playing my promo. You can find out more aboug Greg, Tonya and the lads at:
http://www.dancingwithelephants.com - Finally, as promised, here is the link to the Futurama video that inspired the title of this episode:
http://tinyurl.com/7xb2rh
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Hi, Kevin.
I’m honored that my Tweets inspired you! At least some good has come out of our ordeal.
A few days ago I came across a story in Wired about someone who tried to build an ice hotel in Alaska and was forced to instead open it as a museum because the building inspector insisted that it didn’t have an adequate sprinkler system — yes, a building made completely of ice apparently still needs a sprinkler system because the building codes aren’t set up to deal with ice structures.
I thought you’d like that story. I’m sure you could tell it better than I did.
Thanks for letting me turn that Tweet-stream into this essay and double-thanks for sharing that story about the ice hotel. I’d like to say I found it unbelievable, but sadly …