Phucking Dumb

I know this is so overstated as to be a tautology, but, as an employee of a large university in the Northeast, it never ceases to amaze me how completely unassociated one's level of education is from one's level of intelligence. Of the three people in the "chain of command" above me, one has a master's degree and the other two have PhDs. Yet they are completely incapable of communicating with each other, and make decisions with no thought about the ramifications of what they are doing.

I generate reports that are distributed to the deans, chairpersons and administrative directors of all the colleges, departments and various little affiliated research entities in the university. Six months ago my boss's boss's boss sent me a two-line email that said, in effect, stop sub-dividing all these numbers up into such small entities. Assign everything to the larger departments. On the face of it, it sounds like a great idea. It simplifies things and it creates the impression that the departments are doing more work (because the activity that is being reported is chopped up into larger pieces.) But anyone who knows anything about universities knows how political everything is. I know my boss's boss's boss, and I know there is no arguing with him, at least at my level, but replied to his email with a copy to my boss, essentially saying I would do what I was told but they might want to have a discussion about the effects of such a decision. (I won't get into the whole side issue of how annoying it is to have someone three steps up the ladder from me send emails directly to me asking me to do things without informing my boss and his boss. I spend most of my day explaining to my immediate supervisor why I've done half the things I've done, because he has no idea what's going on.) No discussion happened.

Fast forward six months, and there is a veritable shit-storm of ill will flying around because all the directors of these various entities are no longer seeing their names listed separately in the reports. My boss starts hounding me, and I bounce his boss's boss's email (always save every email you get) to him. The offended party goes to my boss's boss's boss, raises a stink, and all of a sudden I am being told, "No, we didn't mean it like that. We meant keep doing it the way you've been doing it all along, but uhm, make it look a little different or mumble humblecoughsputterewhatever just fix it."

So not only are these people Ph.ucking D.umb, they've got no balls. Makes me want to chuck it all and go into landscaping.