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It has its origins in Agile methodology, although it’s Agile hopped up on crystal meth and spoiling for a fight:
ONE OF THE GREAT BESETTING PROBLEMS OF THE MODERN AGE is what to do with too much information. This is especially true of high-frequency share trading, where every second a Sahara-sized sand dune of data must be gulped down and sifted for the fragrant cat-turds of relevant market movements.
I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they’re almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn’t stealthily dump core in your shoes.)
Some people aspire to necromancy; others have necromancy thrust upon them; me, I just didn’t scream and run away fast enough when necromancy came and kicked down my office door.
The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.
Karma is your vengeful bunny-boiler ex, lurking in your darkened front hallway wearing an ice-hockey mask and carrying a baseball bat inscribed with BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING.
We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.
I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.
Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement.
(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))
A bureaucracy is all about standardization, so that necessary tasks can be accomplished regardless of the abilities of the human resources assigned to it.
