Today was an office day. I like to think it’s also the day when we reached peak in-office fuckery. In order to understand why that’s the case, I should probably provide a little bit of background information.

When you have a billion dollar office complex, there’s always things that need fixing. It’s an issue probably multiplied because the whole thing was slapped together by the low bidder. Keeping up with general repairs and preventative maintenance given the perennial lack of money and personnel for those things is often more something done with a lick and a promise rather than really getting after the problems and making permanent fixes.

Today was supposed to be an exception to the rule. In order to make this particular fix, though, the whole damned building allegedly had to fall off the local power grid. Those of us serviced by the emergency generator would still have some limited power to run laptops and a few other odds and ends, but we’d be sitting in the dark while doing it since the overhead lights don’t rate having backup power. That’s not necessarily an issue elsewhere, but since the room we’re in is a windowless box anyway, how much natural light streams into the rest of the building from outside doesn’t really matter.

This “planned power outage” was scheduled to start at 7:30 and last four hours. By 1:00 this afternoon, the whole thing seemed decidedly suspect. A half an hour later or so, it was revealed that although it had been publicized as a planned outage, it turns out there wasn’t going to be one in order to do whatever work they were supposed to do. It was a big overture for a little show. You might think that planning, scheduling, and communication would be an integral part of life in the bureaucracy… but in most cases you’d be wrong. It’s more like a never ending game of the blind leading the blind.

Even though the lights didn’t go out this time, I had to wonder if all this wasn’t an allegory for the whole damned organization. Sitting in the dark waiting for stuff to happen is pretty much the definitive experience of being a cog in Uncle’s great machine… even on those days when the dark is only figurative rather than literal.