[3catsanadog]

Most government jobs entail pushing paper from one side of the desk to the other. The only time they break a sweat is when they grab one of the 20-30 stampers on their desk to slam them down on the papers that they get paid to thumb through.

Last job I had at a major oil company I worked at was with a department that was involved in coal liquefaction. We were partnered with a Japanese group and a German group and also the Department of Energy. Every single memo, report, letter, etc. that I and other secretaries produced had to be copied umpteen times for all involved. I'm talking at least 100 copies.

I found a comic in the Sunday paper one weekend at that time that described precisely the way the government worked. The first screen were the characters marching along a path, then they get to a chasm. One asks how are we supposed to get over this? Another suggests they ask the government. The last screen is the marchers crossing the chasm on stacks of paper.

I don't know what comic it was in but it was jaw-dropping appropriate.

[FReepaholic]

The standing joke at the Kennedy Space Center when I worked there was NASA couldn’t launch the Space Shuttle until the paperwork weighed as much as the vehicle.

[bioqubit]

More appropriate was a real story in Hawaii involving a broken road. Locals fixed in a few days, took the government two years to get around to dealing with it, so to speak.