Brain Sausage

Let’s take a look at where a lot of us work, the bureaucracy.  Here’s a definition from Webster’s:

bureaucracy
noun bureaucracies

1. A system of government by officials who are responsible to their department heads and are not elected.  Thesaurus: administration, government, officialdom, the system, the power structure, apparatus, apparat

2. These officials as a group, especially when regarded as oppressive.

3. Any system of administration in which matters are complicated by complex procedures and trivial rules.  Thesaurus: red tape, routine, regulations, officialism.

4. A country governed by officials.

I work at a huge bureaucracy.  There are bigger ones, our Nation is one.  I believe that bureaucracies give people power that should not have it.  Sure, there are good people within them, but they are at the mercy of all the forms and rules and regulations.  One of the things it is important to learn in a bureacracy is the chain of command.  I happen to be an administrative assistant.  I’m just above the temps and the janitors on the totem pole, and not by much.  My boss - bosses - are respectively Mary R., the Director…and Rob M., the VP.  This is a job where people do not get in touch with you unless you screw something up for them and they have to have someone to blame.  This is a job where forms and interoffice memos are more important than getting well.  This is a job where someone can make me do work on a spreadsheet because she has no idea how to make headers, footers, and guide lines.

They are awful, terrible, horrid places to work.  I’m sure some of them are better than others, but the one I’m at is an epitome of the definition above.  Yesterday, there was a big meeting on our new Brand Strategy.  Would you like to know our new slogan?  Ok.  It’s "Together We Are Stronger".  Someone (a person better than me, obviously) was paid a huge sum of money to come up with that.  This is inane.  They have started placing this logo everywhere.  Big banners in our lobby proclaiming it.  Kind of Nazi-esque, eh?  The Nazis operated on some sort of bureaucratic level also.

The consultants (god, someone give me a pistol with a laser-scope and a roomful of consultants) then proceeded to show us our survey results (we took a survey about this new brand strategy a few weeks ago) and we found out that most people here think the organization does not value them.  Over 80% of us feel like we work for a heartless machine with a soulless void to be filled by coversheets and software request forms and meeting reservation forms.  Do you know why we feel that way?  BECAUSE WE DO.  Our place of business is just that…a place of business.  I would say I do an hour of work a day.  I am here at my desk for 7.5 hours.  I’ll bet you that over 80% are in the same boat.  Why do this?  Why don’t we work 3 hours a day?  4 days a week?  What makes this inefficient antiquated bureaucracy keep going?

The answer is control.  It’s very subtle and psychological, but the methods are all there.  They are there to break our will and keep us docile so we keep feeding the machine’s insatiable maw.  If you keep me at a desk and tell me that I am safe as long as I follow the rules and fill out the correct forms, then I will eventually be broken and believe that you must be telling the truth.

It is all a horrible lie.  But I am not angry.  This is the way the world works.  I am no longer stupid enough to work that way anymore.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.