The Bureaucracy Premium

Consider, if you will, the humble Ethernet cable. A simple device, designed to connect, to transmit, to generally make things work. One might think, in the realm of corporate IT support, that the path of least resistance—and greatest speed—would be universally celebrated. But as a recent Reddit post from an on-site IT professional reveals, human systems are rarely so straightforward. Our IT protagonist, faced with a network issue, offered the obvious, immediate fix: “Just plug in an Ethernet cable.” The user, however, insisted on the ‘official’ channels, triggering what we might call the Doctrine of Documented Rectification: a preference for process over pragmatic outcome. It’s a curious preference, to be sure, and one that offers a fascinating case study in organizational incentives. (One is reminded of the university staffer who demanded WordPerfect 5.1 installations; some rituals, it seems, are too sacred to abandon).

Now, why would a perfectly capable user opt for a multi-day wait when a five-second action would suffice? One naive micro-model posits that the user, perhaps, seeks not merely a solution, but an attested solution. To manually plug in a cable is to admit a certain autonomy, a potential for self-service that might undermine the perceived value of the IT department, or perhaps, the user’s own right to specialized assistance. The official ticket, by contrast, provides a legible audit trail, a clear assignment of responsibility, and the comforting imprimatur of a system, even if that system’s primary output is delay. (This is distinct from the IT department’s perspective, for whom printers, as one commenter aptly noted, are always “the bane of [their] existence” and elicit only questions like, “PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?”).

The IT professional, operating under the implicit terms of the Malicious Compliance Protocol (a non-negotiable clause in the unwritten employee handbook), duly obliged. The simple cable-plugging task, initially a matter of moments, was escalated. It entered the queue, meandered through the appropriate channels, and was eventually resolved—presumably by the same cable being plugged in—a full half-week later. The user got their ‘official’ fix. The company got to pay for a perfectly functional network connection to sit idle for days. It’s a trade-off, certainly: the immediate efficiency of a direct solution versus the procedural comfort of a system that, while slow, is undeniably a system.

Ultimately, this episode serves as a neat little illustration of how often we prioritize the how over the what. A problem was solved, eventually, and probably by the easiest means possible. But the method of delivery, the ritual of the ticket, the bureaucratic performance of it all, transformed a simple act into a significant delay. Call it the ‘Administrative Value-Add’: the perceived worth of a solution increases exponentially with the number of forms filed and the time elapsed. Seems efficient, in a ‘for certain values of efficient’ and ‘seems’ sort of way.