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Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder is not the organic-based disease that (I think) is better known. Rather, OCPD is just another wrong way to look at the world. You could summarize it as faith in The Rules, combined with bafflement and suppressed rage when The Rules don't work, when following The Rules doesn't lead to success, when other people flout The Rules and are not immediately struck down by Lightning from On High.
People who work for the government are often subject to OCPD. Whether that's because they've worked with the system for too long, because they had this blind faith in The Rules all along, or because of some combination of the two, I do not know.
I would say that if you're entrusted with enforcing the regulations, it is not a bad thing to think that The Rules should be followed and that they are important. I will also admit that I have bouts of OCPD myself. Fortunately, I deal with people outside the system. I deal with the real world. And, dare I say it, I am not entirely stupid. So there are limits to how blindly I will follow The Rules. And a lot of my particular OPCD anger is against the rules themselves, for having been written (as they sometimes are) in ways that can't be enforced or understood, and in ways that move us away from the very goals for which The Rules were written in the first place. Nevertheless, I can be unreasonable about The Rules. I know it. I really shouldn't get down on other sufferers the way I do.
The problem is that as with everything else, in bureaucracy and in faith in The Rules there are degrees, there are levels. Generally you have more rigid, less intelligent faith in The Rules as you move up from us front-line cannon-fodder to the middle management levels; then less and less, until you get to the top layer of the bureaucracy, the legislature, who have no respect for the laws at all. And as you move right-to-left across the organization, from those of us who deal with the public to those who deal with front-line workers, but not the public, to those who are so far back into the organization that they don't even know the public exists, you get a greater and greater level of the disorder.
In short, you, Joe Citizen, might deal with me and think that I am an unreasonable, inflexible bureaucrat. But you have no idea. No frickin' idea at ALL. We front-liners have to deal with deeper and deeper levels of bureaucracy, the support staff and the people who support the support staff and the people who support them, and each succeeding remove from reality means that their heads are jammed in that much higher and tighter, until no light can reach them at ALL and their brains turn to mush from lack of air.
Which brings me to our Department of Information Technology.
There was a time when each of our divisions had their own IT staff, who would take care of our problems and fix whatever needed fixing. Now, one thing the higher-ups always say is that they want to do what's right to help us, that they value our contributions, that customer service and keeping us informed, that consulting with us about what we need, are all vital, and that they will spare no effort to take care of us. But they took everyone's individual IT staff and ripped them away from us, of course without consulting us at all-- they just did it. And the new DIT acts in the same way. They won't fix anything we need fixed, but they will reach down and change things at random in our computers and software. Change things so that our old programs, that we still need to do our work, won't work any more. Change things so we can't fix their screw-ups. Change things so we all have the DIT screensaver with quotes from the DIT mission statement, and it comes on after 10 minutes, and you can't even change THAT, for heavens's sakes.
They say this is important for purposes of computer security. Computer security is important; they read that in a column in BYTE somewhere, I think. So we're going to have it, whether we need it or not.
Which we don't, because all our computers are in a locked, secure building, and don't have anything but public information on them anyway. Of course my messages asking that my computer be allowed to go more than 10 minutes idle before everything locks up and I have to log in again have gone unanswered-- one of the secrets of the DITiots is that, like most service providers who claim that Your Call is Important to Us, they make it impossible to actually reach anybody or talk to anybody. (At that, the inability to contact anyone at all with my problems is a step up from what my cell phone company, Alltel, does; or what Charter, my cable and internet provider, does. They ship my calls off to the same guy in the Philippines, who has a third-grade education and command of no more than six words of heavily-accented English. It's amazing how quickly and cheaply this guy who doesn't speak English can dispose of those annoying customer service calls.)
Of course if I ever DID get through to someone DITiot in power and told him my concerns, I'd just get the Stupid Stubborn Cow Look and "Are you seriously saying that you're against computer security?" Inner-zone bureaucrats always have that brainless look and a no-win question ready for you, should you dare to attempt to illuminate the lightless abyss in which they dwell.
And then I'd probably get a reprimand for having a bad attitude. That's happened too.
However, I have discovered a way to solve the ten minute computer lock problem. If the computer never goes idle, it won't be idle for ten minutes; if it isn't idle for ten minutes, it won't lock. And there's a hardware device that can prevent the computer from going idle for as long as you wish. A device literally millions of years in development.
It's called a rock. If you balance a rock on the mouse button so it sends a constant stream of mouseclicks into the comptuer.. problem solved.
Or so I've heard. I wouldn't have a bad enough attitude to actually try something like that MYSELF, you understand.
People who work for the government are often subject to OCPD. Whether that's because they've worked with the system for too long, because they had this blind faith in The Rules all along, or because of some combination of the two, I do not know.
I would say that if you're entrusted with enforcing the regulations, it is not a bad thing to think that The Rules should be followed and that they are important. I will also admit that I have bouts of OCPD myself. Fortunately, I deal with people outside the system. I deal with the real world. And, dare I say it, I am not entirely stupid. So there are limits to how blindly I will follow The Rules. And a lot of my particular OPCD anger is against the rules themselves, for having been written (as they sometimes are) in ways that can't be enforced or understood, and in ways that move us away from the very goals for which The Rules were written in the first place. Nevertheless, I can be unreasonable about The Rules. I know it. I really shouldn't get down on other sufferers the way I do.
The problem is that as with everything else, in bureaucracy and in faith in The Rules there are degrees, there are levels. Generally you have more rigid, less intelligent faith in The Rules as you move up from us front-line cannon-fodder to the middle management levels; then less and less, until you get to the top layer of the bureaucracy, the legislature, who have no respect for the laws at all. And as you move right-to-left across the organization, from those of us who deal with the public to those who deal with front-line workers, but not the public, to those who are so far back into the organization that they don't even know the public exists, you get a greater and greater level of the disorder.
In short, you, Joe Citizen, might deal with me and think that I am an unreasonable, inflexible bureaucrat. But you have no idea. No frickin' idea at ALL. We front-liners have to deal with deeper and deeper levels of bureaucracy, the support staff and the people who support the support staff and the people who support them, and each succeeding remove from reality means that their heads are jammed in that much higher and tighter, until no light can reach them at ALL and their brains turn to mush from lack of air.
Which brings me to our Department of Information Technology.
There was a time when each of our divisions had their own IT staff, who would take care of our problems and fix whatever needed fixing. Now, one thing the higher-ups always say is that they want to do what's right to help us, that they value our contributions, that customer service and keeping us informed, that consulting with us about what we need, are all vital, and that they will spare no effort to take care of us. But they took everyone's individual IT staff and ripped them away from us, of course without consulting us at all-- they just did it. And the new DIT acts in the same way. They won't fix anything we need fixed, but they will reach down and change things at random in our computers and software. Change things so that our old programs, that we still need to do our work, won't work any more. Change things so we can't fix their screw-ups. Change things so we all have the DIT screensaver with quotes from the DIT mission statement, and it comes on after 10 minutes, and you can't even change THAT, for heavens's sakes.
They say this is important for purposes of computer security. Computer security is important; they read that in a column in BYTE somewhere, I think. So we're going to have it, whether we need it or not.
Which we don't, because all our computers are in a locked, secure building, and don't have anything but public information on them anyway. Of course my messages asking that my computer be allowed to go more than 10 minutes idle before everything locks up and I have to log in again have gone unanswered-- one of the secrets of the DITiots is that, like most service providers who claim that Your Call is Important to Us, they make it impossible to actually reach anybody or talk to anybody. (At that, the inability to contact anyone at all with my problems is a step up from what my cell phone company, Alltel, does; or what Charter, my cable and internet provider, does. They ship my calls off to the same guy in the Philippines, who has a third-grade education and command of no more than six words of heavily-accented English. It's amazing how quickly and cheaply this guy who doesn't speak English can dispose of those annoying customer service calls.)
Of course if I ever DID get through to someone DITiot in power and told him my concerns, I'd just get the Stupid Stubborn Cow Look and "Are you seriously saying that you're against computer security?" Inner-zone bureaucrats always have that brainless look and a no-win question ready for you, should you dare to attempt to illuminate the lightless abyss in which they dwell.
And then I'd probably get a reprimand for having a bad attitude. That's happened too.
However, I have discovered a way to solve the ten minute computer lock problem. If the computer never goes idle, it won't be idle for ten minutes; if it isn't idle for ten minutes, it won't lock. And there's a hardware device that can prevent the computer from going idle for as long as you wish. A device literally millions of years in development.
It's called a rock. If you balance a rock on the mouse button so it sends a constant stream of mouseclicks into the comptuer.. problem solved.
Or so I've heard. I wouldn't have a bad enough attitude to actually try something like that MYSELF, you understand.
