Month: January 2011

My friend Bill Jobsworth and his co-worker Adam Droid have been fighting about the format of an important memo.  Because this conflict was creating an irregular situation, Jobsworth and Droid were summoned to a mediation meeting.  An insider has leaked the meeting minutes to this Carnival for the instruction and benefit of bureaucratic-kind.

Management: “Right.  We have sorta a … misunderstanding here.  Can we just go ahead and, yeaaah, communicate?”

Jobsworth: “It’s a red-cover memo.”

Droid:  “Yellow.”

Jobsworth: “Red.”

Droid: “Yellow.”

Jobsworth: “Red.”

Management: “Yeah, well, it hasn’t been read.”

Jobsworth: “It should be red.”

Droid: “Yellow.”

Management: “No, I’m sorry, but, yeah, I have to say, well, just not true.  Jobsworth has sacrificed his life for this organization, right?”

Jobsworth: “It must be red.”

Management: “Hey, I’m in charge here.  I decide what’s read, not you.”

Droid: “Yellow.”

Managment: “Hmmm, you’ve got a strong point.”

Droid: “Yellow.”

Management: “Oookay, do we have consensus on yellow?”

Jobsworth: “I don’t agree.”

Management: “Well, hmmm, can we go ahead and agree to disagree…yeah?”

Droid: “Yellow.”

Jobsworth: “I disagree.”

Management:  “Hey, I don’t need to remind you, you know, that I’m the Deputy Senior Vice President in Charge for this division, because, well, yeah, you can read that on my door name plate, … I’m not throwing my weight around, right, I just want to get all of us on the same page, that’s all.”

Droid: “Yellow.”

Management: “Right…”

Jobsworth: “It’s a red-cover memo.”

[At this point, a Corporate Bureau of Investigations’ agent burst into my bedroom and threatened me with imprisonment plus torture if I continued to leak the memo.  By the grace of that action, this leak now abruptly and inartfully ends.  A note to the curious: Jobsworth and Droid remain at work together to this day.]

This month we call on all supporters of science to rally to support the current bureaucratic institution of science.  Recently a nine-page article by twelve authors was published in Science.  Science is a scientific publication with the rank of approximately First Senior Vice President in the scientific journal hierarchy.  The published article attracted a wide range of criticism that identified many ways in which the article’s claims were improbable and not substantiated.  This mean-spirited, outrageous, and destructive discussion of a scientific article must stop.  The article’s final conclusion was this: “Exchange of one of the major bioelements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical significance.”  Without a doubt, it unquestionably may.  Even if it may not, it still may.

Felisa Wolf-Simon, the first-listed author of the article (a distinguished position among the list of twelve authors and somewhat analogous to the person who actually gives the PowerPoint presentation for the department)  has made an urgent plea for stifling discussion of the scientific article.  In a vigorous and admirable defense of scientific bureaucracy, she declared, “Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated.”  The peer-review process helps to ensure that discussion is of the same quality as Wolf-Simon’s paper.  Ensuring that all discussion is properly moderated is an imp0rtant and underfunded task.  Next month, at the Thirty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Association 0f Scientific Discussion Moderators, delegates will consider amendments to the rules of scientific discussion moderation and explore ways to secure funding for additional, urgently needed, discussion moderators.

Nature opportunistically used this crisis to strike a blow at its rival Science.  Science, in turn, has a history of poking, prodding, and seeking to uncover Nature.  Such inter-organizational rivalries complexify efforts to deepen and accelerate efforts to form larger, more encompassing organizations.  Scientific bureaucrats of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your profession!

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats.  Enjoy previous bureaucratic carnivals here.  Nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.