FOAD #15

It's the same all over the world:

Situation: We have to have official rules for everything (except breathing, but they are working on that) in Germany. So in order that we can choose our students at university, we have to have rules stating how we choose. These have to be fair and equal and non-discriminatory and and and and. My colleagues and I spent two wonderful summer days locked into a room making up rules for this and other stuff. We submitted them at the beginning of September. And there they lay. We inquired occasionally as to their status and got gruff: we'll get to it when we get to it.

Finally, in January of the next year, it is our rules' time to be checked before getting passed up the chain to the next official.

And we get hit with the nasty whip: Bad boys and girls. You just copied the rules from your Master's program for your Bachelor's program. We passed new rules on how to do such rules (meta-rules, if you will) in November of last year, you should have been aware of this.

My FOAD:

Dear Ma'am. Interesting. We developed the rules in August. We sent them to your office in September, where they have been waiting for confirmation ever since. No, we were not able to incorporate the new rules about rules passed in November into our rules written in August, for obvious reasons.

(Unfortunately, she did not understand, and went on about how the rules about the rules are published somewhere on the Intranet. I rejoinded that I can't guess that someone has passed rules and published them somewhere - it would be really, really nice if someone would tell me about this. Perhaps the office who has been sitting on my rules since September? This is a rather large indication that we are concerning ourselves with rules, if we have already handed in a version......

This did not compute. Sigh. Will the good doctor prescribe a nice aquavit to calm my nerves?)