I worked in an organization with lots of processes. I was in an office with no windows, a bit of a hole or maybe even oubliette. You couldn’t tell time of day, weather, etc but it was better than a cubicle.

My door opened to a 10 foot hallway with and about 5 feet down there was a large window. It was a weird L-shape and no one else’s office or cube or anything was in the hallway to nowhere. So it was kind of nice that no one walked by and it was off the beaten path.

The window in the hallway was closed with blinds. But if I opened them it was possible to get some ambient light effects so while I couldn’t see out it from inside my office, I could tell if it was day or night. So it was better.

A few weeks went by and the blinds were closed one day. That’s weird, no one comes by here. I asked some nearby coworkers if they knew who closed and why and they didn’t know. No one knew. The entire floor is probably the size of a football field and has 100 offices around the edge with 200 cubes and conference rooms and stuff in the middle. My team is probably 10 people and there’s lots of other groups.

No one I knew knew and didn’t really care. I maybe spent 2-3 minutes because I was surprised that anyone walked by here, much less cared. I opened the blinds and when about my business.

About a week later, the blinds were closed again. Weird, but again I checked and no one I knew cared. I opened them again.

3 days later, they were closed. Repeat a few times and now I was opening them every day and someone else was closing them. Weird and funny.

This went on for a few days and the blinds would close in the middle of the day. I spent about 3-6 hours out of my office doing different stuff so I come and go. So I would now open them whenever I noticed them back down during the day.

Finally, I’m in my office and I hear the metallic zip sound of blinds closing. I stick my head of of my office and say hello to someone from a different floor and group, I’ll call her Betty.

I ask Betty what’s up and she tells me that she’s closing the blinds. I ask why and she says because they are supposed to be closed. I explain why I like them open and that there’s no one else who sees this window and she again says the blinds must be down.

Interesting. I love arbitrary rules as a big board game fan. I ask about why, and she says that no building things can be changed without a business justification as required by OSHA, fire marshalls, and emergency coordinators.

I tell her that I think this wouldn’t apply to something as minor as a window blind, but she assured me it’s for everything.

I try a different tack and propose that the natural state is open, and that she is actually the one who needs a justification to close. But she’s too smart for that, she produces an inventory of the building that she makes each January that clearly shows the blinds closed for the past few years.

She is not joking or being ironic. She’s serious.

So I ask how business justifications are evaluated and she says that they are submitted to her and she evaluates them. There’s no template or format and no one has ever submitted one in the 10 years she was in this role.

Wow, ok. I go ahead and tell her I’ll write one and ask how to submit them.

This is funny to me, so later that evening, I spend a few minutes and write up a justification email. It’s pretty bullshit and basically says “Window blinds open makes me happier, and thus more productive. Closed blinds reduce productivity and thus reduce organization impact. Yadda yadda yadda.”

It’s maybe two paragraphs. She replies that my justification is insufficient and that the blinds will stay closed.

This is now less funny. So I look her up in the company director. She is a random workgroup’s secretary and is a contractor who has been in the building forever. She has contracted for three different companies, but has always sat there. She schedules appointments and orders staples and stuff for about 20 of the hundreds of people in the building. She’s on a different floor than me. There’s five floors. Her group is entirely on a different floor.

This is bizarre. With this knowledge, I resubmit a revised justification. She denies it again. I respond copying her contracting monitor or whatever you call the person who organizes the contract, pointing out this bizarre process. The contracting person is confused and responds that this is not in any contract, they don’t give a shit, and question why this is done.

After a few days of email silence, the contracting person responds that the blinds will stay open. I never hear from Betty again.

I moved out of that office about 5 years ago. The blinds stayed open while I was there.

About a year or two ago, I was in that building and I walked by my old area to talk to some former co-workers and noticed the blinds were down.

I gave a quick recap and the current occupant didn’t care and hadn’t noticed. But they did say that Betty was still there.

I think people get really invested in a process they think is important, but is only important to them. A co-worker called this “building imaginary castles in the sky.”

It was really cool to them, but meaningless to any observer. Sometimes it’s useful in the long run for something else, but hard to tell immediately.

There’s confusion that gets compounded and you have real stuff wrapped around it. It seems like it may be bullshit. It makes me think how much of what I care about is just organizational lock-in and not really meaningful.

Note: I found this post when I was cleaning out my phone and I think I wrote it in 2018. So I expect this story took place in 2013 or so. Given the current state of government shutdown and free time, I thought that it’s theme of people doing crazy stuff for unknown reasons was still relevant.

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