“Murphy’s Law”

From my “Murphy’s Law” desk calendar archives thanks to Aunt Evelyn, Uncle Pipey, and cousin Nancy:

Cohn’s First Law: In any bureaucracy, paperwork increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and less you do.

Goofy guy’s experience with Cohn’s First Law: Then eventually, you are reporting on nothing since your are doing nothing but paperwork, and that’s okay because no one reads your paperwork but then holds meetings to reduce paperwork in which you have to keep minutes and provide to all in paperwork (and now on the computer) for the paperwork  you are attempting to reduce but never will since you are now doing nothing but paperwork.

Example: In the 1970’s, the Navy came out with a force-wide program to reduce reports. A large committee was formed and assigned the task. They met and met and met and decided they needed to know the extent of the problem. So the first radio message they sent to the entire fleet was for each command to submit a report with a list of all the reports they were required to submit. As i recall, not one report was eliminated, thus resulting reporting all the reports plus one. 

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