Bureaucracy means 'bureau' and 'crazy'?

JAKARTA (JP): As a teacher at a university, I had to get the rector's signature on an important document a couple of weeks ago. I was quite confident that it would only take a minute since I heard the rector was nice and easygoing.

Armed with this attitude, I headed to his office. My confidence diminished a bit when his secretary told me that since I was a teacher at the institution, I had to get a letter of reference from the bureau for academic administration.

So I went to the bureau and explained my purpose to the person in charge. He assured me that all the papers would be ready and signed by the following day. Well, while it wasn't as easy as I first hoped it would be, at least everything would be finished by tomorrow.

Or so I thought.

The next day, I went back to the bureau as instructed to pick up my papers and found myself up against a stumbling block.

The man I talked to the previous day was not there, replaced by a woman. She looked at me with glaring eyes demanding what I was doing there. I explained that I had come to collect my signed papers.

"What papers?"

I told her. She stared hard for a moment before she went to a desk covered with papers and fumbled through the mound looking for my documents. Finally coming upon them, she read through each critically.

"Don't you know you have to have a reference from the dean for this?" she barked as she spotted the first flaw.

My heart sank, but I calmly said that I would get the letter of reference and be back with it after lunch.

As promised, I returned to the bureau after lunch. The lady was sitting at her desk glaring at some papers as if trying to will them out of existence.

I politely disturbed her concentration and handed her the letter of reference. After scrutinizing it for a while, she spoke. "This is not exactly what I wanted."

By nature, I am a considerably patient person but this lady was really stretching my ability to grin and bear it.

"Do you want me to go back to the dean and get you another letter?" I asked, a little edge creeping into my voice.

"Not really, but this is not the kind of letter I was expecting."

"Well, that's what I got from the dean."

"OK then, if you want to put it that way." She stopped for a moment, thinking hard of some other way to make my life miserable.

She finally found it. "Your papers weren't typed up properly."

"I typed every word of it according to the model the Ministry of Education and Culture gave to me." I took out a fax sheet from the ministry and handed it to her.

She skimmed it and could not put her finger on a defect, which I suspect disappointed her to no end.

"When will my papers be ready?" I asked.

"Try calling me some time next week," she said in a tone that suggested, "if I'm in the mood, I might come round to it some time this year".

I pride myself for walking out of that office without losing my composure, although I did explode later that night when I got a call from a friend.

He happened to stop by the bureau that day after I left. He met this lady and she complained to him about how incompetent I was in this kind of thing. After having her say about me, she returned all of my papers to him with instructions that she wanted it done "properly" this time. That's when I started to do my exploding.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of bureaucracy," my friend said.

Welcome indeed. After this incident, I realized that bureaucracy is the combination of two words: bureau and crazy. Combining the two words, some Greek scholar from ages ago decided to change the letter z to the letter c, because it was easier to pronounce the sound s than the sound z.

Taking the two words above, bureaucracy has the following meaning -- the process of driving other people crazy because of the work which takes place on a desk.

I personally think that the only way to deal with bureaucracy without going insane is to persevere. Never let bureaucrats get you down, because they take pleasure in the suffering of us common people. It makes them more powerful. The more we persevere when dealing with them, the weaker they become.

Any way is considered legal when dealing with bureaucracy. Until recently, maneuvering through bureaucracy in Indonesia meant spending some money. The more you spent, the quicker you saw the results.

However, I did not want to give the lady the pleasure of both squeezing me like a bug and spending the money which I have worked so hard to get.

I sidestepped her instead. Due to the secrecy involved, I am not allowed to disclose the path I took. The most important thing is that all my documents are now finally settled and I feel absolutely great for outsmarting the lady. It is the ultimate reward for traversing the wonderful world of bureaucracy.

-- Laila Faisal