The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: Transit & Rule #4

The Rules of Bureaucracy

Rule #O: "The Rules of Bureaucracy are mutable, non-canonical, non-ordinal, and contradictory, except in the cases where they are not."
Rule #1: "Document everything you do; if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen."
Rule #2 [The Sixty Minutes Rule]: "Never do anything that would cause Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Steve Croft, Leslie Stahl, or even Andy Rooney to persue you down a hallway with a camera crew."
Rule #3: "Nothing Simple is Ever Easy"
Rule #4: "It's about the money; follow the money."
Rule #5: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Rule #6: "Politics is the enemy of good government."
Rule #7: "The biggest detriment to public service is the public."
Rule #8: "The second biggest detriment to public service is the service."
Rule #9: "There's a reason; there's ALWAYS a reason."
Rule #10: "The Law is a harsh mistress: The rigorous and exacting application of which can benefit of society when used correctly to advance good policy and block bad, and be the bane of society when used incorrectly to advance bad policy and block good."
Rule #11: "Public service often involves waking up in the morning, opening up the newspaper, and discovering that someone, somewhere out there thinks that you're a dickhead."
Rule #12: "No one really knows what you do."
Rule #13 [Luke's Rule]: "No one ever acts like the bastard they really are."
Rule #14: "Bureaucracy endures."
Rule #15: "The longer you work in bureaucracy, the more Catch-22 resembles non-fiction."
Rule #16: "Politicians are not smarter than you."
Rule #18: "Money is not created equal."
Rule #19: "Mediocrity is normalcy."
Rule #17: "Within any bureaucratic structure, resources (e.g. people, money, knowledge, etc.) are not distributed uniformly."
Rule #20: "Don't assume a fiduciary liability without a committed resource allocation."
Rule #21: "If you do your job and obey the law, they can't reasonably fire you."
Rule #22: "The Budget will always be wrong."
Rule #23: "Always sign in blue."
Rule #24: "A Bureaucrat must be able to explain and justify his/her actions to laymen without resorting to the phrase 'because the Rules say so.'"
Rule #25: "Never voluntarily relinquish control of an original document."
Rule #26: "Sometimes you just have to say 'Screw the rules'"
Rule #27: "Change sucks."
Rule #28: "Sometimes the answer is 'No.'"
Rule #29: "It is very easy to make difficult decisions when no one has a clue what's going on."
Rule #30: "If you hang around long enough, eventually you will become an expert in something."
Rule #31: "Data, technology, and automatic processes can never completely supplant human interaction."
Rule #32: "Cover thine own ass."
Rule #33: "It's not real until it has its own acronym."
Rule #34:There is nothing more dangerous than an elected, resourceful idiot.
Rule #35: It will always take longer than expected.
Rule #36: Coming Soon...

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Transit & Rule #4

I’m a little swamped today, with the plethora of tasks that are piling up, so I can only dash out a brief post right now, hopefully to be followed by a more substantial analysis.

Both Furrow and Jonathan Potts have some very in depth discussions on Pittsburgh’s Port Authority Transit projects and the proposed Mon-Fayette Expressway. Both seem to be puzzled over the rationale for these endeavors, but both agree that these are bad projects.

Bad projects! No biscuit!

So, while I go and brush up on all the back story involved (THE BUREAUCRACY has done little work with the DOT and even less with the State of Pennsylvania), I’ll leave you with Rule #4, “The Money Rule”:

IT’S ABOUT THE MONEY! IF PEOPLE TELL YOU IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY, IT’S MOST DEFINITELY ABOUT THE MONEY. IF IT’S ABOUT POWER, IT’S ABOUT MONEY. IF IT’S ABOUT SEX, IT’S ABOUT POWER. IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE MONEY! FOLLOW THE MONEY!!!

---
This post brought to you by: That light headed feeling you get from missing lunch.

2 comments:

fester said...: First, I thought it was all about the nookie, the nookie, so shove it up your ear... Yeahh!!!

But really, I was trying to follow through on your hyperlinks and they are not working. You might want to work on that. But I agree, there is a boat load of money in both transit projects that make no sense, and I think if you check out Pitt's Blog post about convention centers and other capital intensive supposedly tourism boosting investment schemes, there is a damm common thread here.; 3:02 PM
O said...: Fixed the links; I found out that if you write the HTML in MSWord, the smart quotes screw up everything.; 11:40 AM

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Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Transit & Rule #4

2 comments:

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