The Office of Excessive Readiness

The Bureau Receives a Mission

The order arrived in the ordinary fashion: a sentence nobody was prepared to interpret, issued at the exact moment everyone had begun to leave. “Make sure the formation is ready fifteen minutes before the fifteen-minute check.” No one knew what a pre-check of a check required, but a corporal volunteered to create a tracker.

By morning the tracker had become a spreadsheet. By lunchtime it required an additional tab. At 1600 the team discovered that everyone had been checking whether everyone else had checked the tracker, and nobody had checked whether a formation was actually scheduled.

A Study of Administrative Gravity

The Department of Excessive Readiness was established to study time lost in preparing to appear prepared. Its first hypothesis was elegant: every additional sign-off added a measurable quantity of waiting. Its second hypothesis was that the waiting would grow more expensive with seniority, because the person with the final signature could always schedule a planning meeting for the signatures below.

The junior analyst requested a time budget. The supervisor asked for a cost estimate. The cost estimate required approval from an office that had been reorganized twice since the original request. A memo went out asking whether a time budget was even the correct form.

The Most Scientific Clipboard

The Department ordered a ruggedized clipboard with weatherproof backing, a detachable lanyard and a sleeve for a form that explained how to protect the clipboard. The label on the shipping box said OPERATIONAL DATA INTEGRITY. Inside were seventeen sheets of instructions and a pen that did not work.

“Perfect,” said the director. “We can document the pen failure.” It was the first reliable measurement anyone had collected all week.

A Result That Nobody Requested

At the end of the month the Bureau produced its final research finding: if a meeting began at 0700 and everyone arrived at 0615, the earliest attendee had spent 45 minutes there before the event even started. This conclusion required no advanced mathematics. It did require a stamp, three signatures and a presentation containing an unlabelled pie chart.

The director recommended a corrective action: announce one clear report time. The recommendation was sent to a working group that scheduled a meeting for 0700. Everyone was told to arrive early.

Author note

This is an original fictional chapter from the developing Just Boot Things book. The organizations, characters and dialogue are inventions; no real military unit or person is portrayed. It is separate from the current downloadable four-chapter EPUB sampler.

The Department Invents a New Form

With approval secured, the Bureau created Form 15B, “Request for Permission to Arrive Before an Authorized Arrival.” The first box asked for the planned arrival time. The second asked for the earlier arrival time. The third asked whether the requester had arrived early enough to obtain authorization to submit the first two boxes.

No form could be processed without a supervisor’s signature, but the supervisor had been assigned to a temporary office three buildings away. To ensure adequate accountability, the Bureau sent two runners to confirm that the supervisor was present, then a third runner to confirm the first two had returned. The clock on the wall made a faint ticking sound that everybody pretended not to hear.

The Great Test

At the annual readiness demonstration the director displayed a beautiful graph showing a steady improvement in “pre-arrival compliance.” Nobody asked why the graph began at 100 percent or why the horizontal axis was labelled with types of coffee. A visiting official complimented the colors. The director promised to expand the program.

Only the junior analyst noticed that no one had measured whether the event started on time. He wrote this down and placed it in the box marked “Lessons Learned.” At some point the box was moved into storage to make room for the new readiness certificates.

A Final Memorandum

The conclusion was submitted in the ordinary sequence, then returned with a request to reduce the conclusion to three bullet points. The three points were submitted. The final reviewer asked for more detail, so the Bureau scheduled a briefing. The meeting was to begin at 0700.

The director set his alarm for 0500. The junior analyst, in a rare display of professional courage, decided to arrive at 0700 and call it research.