If I was put on this planet for anything, I'm sure it has something to do with ridding the world of every thread of red tape. Either that or else I'm destined to murder that dog who inherited $50 million after its old maid of an owner kicked the bucket and left her cutelittletiddilyums all her worldly possessions. But no, I'm pretty sure it's the first one. And I mean to follow through. No longer will I sit idly as the layers of bureaucratic bullsh*t layer up to my neck and down my throat. No longer will I wait in line at the bursar's office only to have them direct me to the dean who is on vacation until next tuesday but can receive email through her second-favorite secretary named Cindy who can only be reached by email during hours that are multiples of 3. No longer.
Every year the average person wastes days in a bureaucratic jumble. We wait in lines and we fill out forms and we wait in other lines to hand in those forms and ultimately we leave the situation unhappy most likely with more forms to fill out that we will leave unfilled and give up on. And yet bureaucracy is a necessity. We need to fill out our tax forms or else our roads will fall into disrepair, we will get in an accident, and then have to fill out more forms.
But can we separate bad and meaningless red tape from the good kind, or at least a not-bad kind? How many among us have worked in a place where bureaucracy wins the day? Where every little validation needs to be run through and given the okay by every other person at the office. Have you ever worked in an office where there are so many meaningless rules you can't even keep track, where you are pretty confident that all the bureaucracy makes the running of the business less functional, both to employees and customers?
In situations like this would it be immoral for us, the employees, to undermine the rules and cut through the red tape for our own benefit as well as for the customer? I had a campus job where the list of infractions a student might be charged for extends off the paper on the wall right down to the floor and out the door. When my boss wasn't looking over my shoulder I never charged a cent. I let the student know what he did "wrong" and told him if he messed up again he was likely to be charged. Was this wrong of me? I am confident that in my refusal to charge people I was improving the operation of our offices. I am just as confident that if I were to describe the stupidity of our system to my boss it would have been rejected and never looked at again. I was just a lowly student employee with hardly enough clout to quit on any terms let alone my own.
When is it right for the low level employee to take the system into his own hands to smooth the process and when should he just start rolling out the red tape as directed?
