R P Herrold wrote:
They are doing a job without any discretion to vary the rules;
There's a wonderful story from Roman imperial history about the Roman
official
in, I think it was Belgium, who rigidly interpreted a tax-in-kind of
"hides" as "ox-hides",
a very expensive commodity, leading to the impoverishment and subsequent
rebellion
of the province, resulting in thousands of deaths and untold property
destruction.
I'm sure that when questioned about his decision, he used the perennial,
tried-and-true
rationale of the incompetent bureaucrat :"I have no discretion to vary
the rules."
The term of art for this kind of behavior, whether it be exhibited in
statecraft or
information management, is /"self-defeating stupidity/". It has been
chronicled exhaustively
by wiser and witter persons than myself, from Jonathan Swift to Dr.
Raymond Peter to
Scott Adams.
--
Jack J. Woehr # «'I know what "it" means well enough, when I find
http://www.well.com/~jax # a thing,' said the Duck: 'it's generally a frog or
http://www.softwoehr.com # a worm.'» - Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_
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