Ah, the Inefficiency!

I am generally a very patient person. Too patient, in fact. Or so my friends say. I can wait for my turn, I can wait for the light to go green, I can weather long, snaking queues. But I can't, for the life of me, tolerate inefficiency. I can wait, wait and wait for as long as I get results.

And so off I was this morning to this particular office with every intention of getting results. I had been told to come back on the first working day of January. Since it's already the third, I figured I'd be out of there in no time.

Wrong. The first person I approached--the head of office on whose desk I saw my office's documents last year--gave me a blank stare and pointed me elsewhere. He continued to chomp on his Skyflakes.

The person "elsewhere" riffled through a tattered logbook then pointed me somewhere else. Four tables and four equally blank stares later, they told me that perhaps it's still with this other office, who showed me proof that the darn thing was received by the first office on December 5!

Miss Tattered Logbook leafed through the pages once again, as if the documents would materialize right before her, sensing that I wasn't being Miss Congeniality anymore. By then, I had already wasted two hours. I went back to the chief, who had the nerve to tell me that he couldn't possibly keep track of all the documents flowing in and out of his territory.

Thirty minutes after my dour exit, a staff from that office showed up with the document. It was, she said, on the chief's desk all along. True enough, it still had a hint of Skyflakes sticking on it.

Talk about "gross" inefficiency!