Doo, doo, doo, looking out my back door
Bureaucracy day!
Here is a game about filing paperwork. The amazing thing is that it actually sounds pretty fun. I am thinking of getting a copy just to admire the sheer achievement of it. Basically the way it works is you send documents around trying to get all the offices to process them in the order that is most advantageous to you. But there are lots of cute things involved like paperclips for counters and the consumption of stimulants in order to get extra turns.
And this provides a nice segue to telling you about my coffee. Yesterday I got an "espresso con panna" for the first time, and the coffee jerk very graciously served it with a ridiculous amount of whipped cream...
Hm. Actually I've already told this story; my heart's not really in it anymore. The payoff is just that if you reheat "espresso con panna," it becomes "espresso con butter" upon cooling.
Enough tangents. The inspiration for bureaucracy day in fact came in a meeting today in which we were swapping stories about how ridiculous the university is, so I thought I'd share an example regarding, I don't even know, like the Capital Outlay and Space Advisory Committee or something.
When the school decides it needs a new building, it determines what it wants and what its budget is, like "I want a building that does xyz, and I have $20 million to spend," and everyone bids and such, saying "Here's my plan to do that for $25 million" and like that.
As a matter of fact, all of the bids do invariably exceed our limit, so then we go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something cheaper, and by the time the proposed building goes through the process again, the bids are the same amount as before because the costs have gone up. So basically the university is planning itself into successively cheaper and cheaper redesigns of the same building just to keep up with rising construction costs.
But wait. We have a solution. Naturally, in coming up with the building project, the committee has estimated how much it will cost, and all this goes into its plan. Even so, once it solicits the bids, it wants to get a head start on planning the revisions, so it goes out and hires an expert to estimate just how far overbudget all of the bids are going to be. Isn't that funny?
Ok, if you did not find this funny I will spare you my story about Reg Fee (or the "Registration Fee Advisory Committee," if you're not into the whole brevity thing).
Here is a game about filing paperwork. The amazing thing is that it actually sounds pretty fun. I am thinking of getting a copy just to admire the sheer achievement of it. Basically the way it works is you send documents around trying to get all the offices to process them in the order that is most advantageous to you. But there are lots of cute things involved like paperclips for counters and the consumption of stimulants in order to get extra turns.
And this provides a nice segue to telling you about my coffee. Yesterday I got an "espresso con panna" for the first time, and the coffee jerk very graciously served it with a ridiculous amount of whipped cream...
Hm. Actually I've already told this story; my heart's not really in it anymore. The payoff is just that if you reheat "espresso con panna," it becomes "espresso con butter" upon cooling.
Enough tangents. The inspiration for bureaucracy day in fact came in a meeting today in which we were swapping stories about how ridiculous the university is, so I thought I'd share an example regarding, I don't even know, like the Capital Outlay and Space Advisory Committee or something.
When the school decides it needs a new building, it determines what it wants and what its budget is, like "I want a building that does xyz, and I have $20 million to spend," and everyone bids and such, saying "Here's my plan to do that for $25 million" and like that.
As a matter of fact, all of the bids do invariably exceed our limit, so then we go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something cheaper, and by the time the proposed building goes through the process again, the bids are the same amount as before because the costs have gone up. So basically the university is planning itself into successively cheaper and cheaper redesigns of the same building just to keep up with rising construction costs.
But wait. We have a solution. Naturally, in coming up with the building project, the committee has estimated how much it will cost, and all this goes into its plan. Even so, once it solicits the bids, it wants to get a head start on planning the revisions, so it goes out and hires an expert to estimate just how far overbudget all of the bids are going to be. Isn't that funny?
Ok, if you did not find this funny I will spare you my story about Reg Fee (or the "Registration Fee Advisory Committee," if you're not into the whole brevity thing).
posted by Evan at 3:48 PM
1 Comments:
Yay!
This reminds me of the story of Space Station Freedom. Does anybody besides nerds who went to space camp remember Space Station Freedom? President Reagan announced the thing in his 1984 SoTU address, but it never got built. They came up with a design, estimated costs, had lots of discussions, and decided that they couldn't swing the X billion dollars on it. So they went through a lot of studies, made a lot of revisions, etc., finally getting the price down to X-Y billion dollars. The problem: that whole process had cost them pretty darn close to Y billion dollars to go through.
I did get to see a mock-up of one of the later revisions, which was pretty cool, but also quite a bit more modest, and finally the whole thing was scrapped in favor of some kind of half-assed international version that we have today. And of course, we probably could have managed something better for our money if we'd built the one that was "too expensive."
Ve don't care. Ve still vant ze money, Lebowski, or ve fuck you up.
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