On the one hand, when we see incidents of people making vast issues out of what seems small things, we think words like disproportionate, overdone, exaggerated, etc.

On the other hand, when you did deeper, there's almost always a logic to it.

An example:

As a programmer working for a custom-software company, we did projects for different clients. I once got sent out on a 7 day trip to the far end of Canada to work with a wireless provider to get our mobile workstation and communications gateway (for our federal policing agency) to run over their network (we did use a lightweight radio network abstraction layer, so we had to procure their library for the new network protocols and then do our part - because it was lightweight, I ended up having to write code to handle congestion management (a Backoff-N strategy), packet sequencing and retransmissions for lost packets, and such like. So we had 7 days to do this... which is not long for a new library and a new protocol with unknown issues to wrestle with.

So we show up, the engineer lets us into their test lab in the middle of their secured operation, and we uncrate our development desktops and... then we waited... for a IT tech to come in and run an ethernet cable from the jack in the wall to our machines. Pardon? I said... "Time is short... why don't we just plug in and get going?".... Engineer: "Oh no... can't do that... I'm not risking the union grievance that would entail.".... Me: "??!!????".... Engineer: "Well, the IT guys now are jealous of their duties. They don't have that many. And they are all old radio techs who aren't needed anymore and they jealously defend the few jobs they have got so they can get to retirement without losing their jobs."

So, there was a logic there - these people appeared to be control freaks, but all it boiled down to was they were folks with a limited range of responsibilities and if those got eroded, they'd be out of a job. I think that applies to many assistants and secretaries in these sorts of situations. Many don't have job security (I saw one gov't dept that was obligated by their own codes to hire a secretary after she'd worked in the same job for at least 6 months, but they kept 'rewriting' the contract every 6 months so it was 'a new contract' ... change a word here or there, add or remove a cosmetic duty.... basically cheating their own system to avoid hiring someone full time).

So the insanities of 'low stakes' usually aren't. There's usually a fairly basic survival mechanism in play. Not always, but more often than you'd think. When any form of business (even libraries or universities are now run that way) operates as businesses do (minimize costs in every way possible), then you get these little fiefdoms with people desperate to hold their job doing insane things as a side-effect of that struggle.

Even university research is like that - competition for grants has (in some places) led to poisonings, stabbings, and other how-could-that-happen scenarios. When we take highly driven people and put their futures that they've worked so long for at risk, sometimes they do crazy things to try to protect it.

The sad part is most of this could be avoided if businesses treated employees as assets and not liabilities.

Of course, if these sorts of hijinks in corporations, gov't depts, or in academic settings are useful to stress players in a game, then that's making some sort of weak lemonade out of a real world misfortune.

TomB