Let me explain.  Michael Tingley, my oft-absent project mentor, promised I would get a chance to sit in on a meeting with clients.  In this case, the far ends of the earth was really just one end of the earth, commonly known as Corvallis.  The demons of bureaucracy were, of course, the clients.  A bureaucracy, for the unenlightened, is a form of administration so horrendously inflexible that it fails to accomplish anything useful.  For example, one part of this bureaucracy claimed that our trees along the fire lane needed to be trimmed to at least 12', to allow the fire trucks to pass by unperturbed.  Another part of the bureaucracy required that trees along the pathway not be more than 15' tall.  Try to envision a tree that fulfills those two criteria, and you'll see our problem.  Maybe you'll even burst out laughing--it's an absurd thought, but each branch of the bureaucracy sees it as not their problem, because rules are rules.  They try to offer reasonable compromises, such as "just don't plant any trees," but that merely creates an eyesore, and a huge contrast against the rest of the green-hued campus.

 

Work at Boora is nice because there is no bureaucracy.  Working some of Boora's clients, however, is less so.  This inflexibility to employ basic common sense undermines that which makes us human.  Our ability to recognize patterns, and subsequently break them, makes our minds powerful.  I'm not saying that one should break every rule in the rulebook just because one can, but that one should weigh the importance of the rule in the context of its usage, and either compromise or throw the rule out entirely.  Sure, you could be a rebel, break the law, and not wear a seatbelt, but that ignores the purpose of the law: safety.  Not only does wearing a seatbelt statistically increase your chances of survival in the event of a car crash, but it increases survivability for everyone in the car.  Yes, you can decide to jaywalk, but do so having verified you're not stepping out into the middle of traffic, especially when engrossed in whatever conversation you're having on your phone or head.

 

If everybody had enough common sense, would we need rules?  Absolutely.  Common sense is not a substitute for rules, and rules are no substitute for common sense.  They complement each other.  The purpose behind rules are not always apparent, especially in the case of a child, who has little experience with the presence of true danger in the world.  A bottle of bleach, for example, warns against consumption via the digestive system because not everybody knows what bleach is, and not everyone understands the inherent danger in a seemingly harmless bottle.  The demons of bureaucracy do not understand that rules and common sense are both necessary.  They use each exclusively, basing their decisions on rules or on common sense, but not a combination.  Because they are so short-sighted, and because their understanding is so nominal, they are the demons of bureaucracy.

 

Note: they weren't actually this bad, but some of the imposed regulations were pretty arbitrary.  I wrote this not against individuals or clients, but against bureaucracy as a whole.

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