The Cycle of Beaurocracy

Today at work I was asked about the lack of “cute pictures” in a technical document I wrote regarding the planned creation of the next phase of the (big, fancy, secret) project I work on. Specifically, the boss wanted Visio flowcharts and screenshots of something that doesn’t exist. I mentioned it earlier today.

Obviously, you can’t just make decisions without preparation. Thus, after some initial deliberation by management, a decision was ultimately made that further decision on the matter should be performed at a meeting. Which is to say, we need to have a meeting to decide on a strategy for creating flowcharts and screenshots of the product that doesn’t exist yet.

Obviously, you can’t just jump into a meeting without preparation. Thus a pre-meeting was to be held so everyone could get their story straight and align their paradigm to the itinerary.

Obviously, you can’t just jump into a pre-meeting without preparation. Thus a preliminary pre-meeting conference had to be organized so everyone at the pre-meeting would be on the same page regarding the propensity for “erroneous itinerary” (Actual quote!) of the pre-meeting.

Obviously, you can’t just jump into a preliminary pre-meeting conference without preparation. Thus a pre-preliminary pre-meeting conference conversation was to be held in an informal setting in order to create teamlike synergy around the aforementioned paradigm and business model whose generalized strategy was aimed in a direction compatible with the overall target outcome of the preliminary pre-meeting conference.

Obviously, you can’t just jump into a pre-preliminary pre-meeting conference conversation without preparation. Thus a meeting had to be scheduled. The cycle was complete. A meeting was promptly scheduled to prepare for the pre-preliminary pre-meeting conference conversation, to prepare for the preliminary pre-meeting conference, to prepare for the pre-meeting, to prepare for the meeting, to make an obvious decision.

All this, just because a boss wants a screenshot of something we haven’t made yet. That, as I understand it, is the purpose of the development lifecycle.

Okay, perhaps I exaggerated a bit. In reality, it was a tentative meeting with no official date and time which had a pre-meeting conference call and was ultimately derailed by implementation concerns. Nonetheless, one’s vernacular is verbosely enhanced when enveloped in a cloud of loquatious paradigm generators.