“Just doing my job…”
You know how there’s famous columns about stupid crook incidents,
Harper’s has its contrived ‘oddball’ stats ‘index’, and there must be
many others suchlike.
Have you ever seen a “Best of the Bureaucrats” column?
Or “America’s Funniest Bureaucrats”? Well, there’s gotta be
a better title. I want it to be universal to show how the
bureaucratic mentality infects so many.
I would think that it would be neat to see all the examples that
people could send in of flunkies from all sorts of careers and jobs
and positions of (micro)authority who get forwards mixed up with backwards,
who gladly give you the shaft (even if faking some kind of sympathy),
all based on “I’m just doing my job” or “I have no choice, once Form
B has been filed then we must confiscate your cats and euthenize them
pending your first hearing 10 months from now” and that sort of
thing. Hilarious examples of “I can’t do that, it’s against policy” would apply.
Also any egregious ignorance or other gaffes due to job myopia or legal
obsession.
–Like the lady who didn’t know there was a famous bike shop next to
her shop (I stepped outside her door, looked out and reported back,
yep it’s a bike shop). Or the lady who didn’t know the name of the next
street over from her house, a house she OWNED—to be helpful I stood
out in the street and squinted, read the other street name and reported back
to her what it was—I suppose turning that way wasn’t part of her commute route.
Or the counter lady at Holiday Inn who didn’t know anything about the
building attached to hers called ‘Holiday Inn Express’—what was different
about it from her regular Holiday Inn, what its rates were—so I went out
the one door, in the other, found out the rates and differences and went
back and reported to the first lady. –She had said that people kept asking
her about that so I figured it might be neat if she finally had something
to tell them.
Maybe it wouldn’t be a popular column coz it would be a mirror rather
than something to laugh at.
