Ready for Reports!

A little after mastadons stopped wandering the earth I was working on a proposed tracking chamber for the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC), and I went to a detector simulation workship in Waxahachie. Inside a warehouse was a cube farm. I learned that a firm's worth of administrators and secretaries had been hired to manage the reports (environmental impact statements just the simplest of these), and that of the several hundred employees only about 1 1/2 were scientists. But volumes of the mandatory reports and plans and purchasing schedules were on the way.

I should have taken warning from that. From the chapter "Plans and Plants" in Parkinson's Law:

Examples abound of new institutions coming into existence with a full establishment of deputy directors, consultants and executives, all these coming together in a building specially designed for their purpose. And experience proves that such an institution will die. It is choked by its own perfection. It cannot take root for lack of soil. It cannot grow naturally for it is already grown.

Why? Parkinson explained: ‘A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done."

And we know the rest of the story. In its infinite wisdom our legislators decreed that all business be done with American firms, at which point the French and Russians and Germans and every other potential partner said "adios." The auditors in Washington decided to experiment with honest cost projections instead of the usual military cost estimators, and got sticker shock from the result. We arm-twisted the Japanese to come on board anyway, and at the banquet at which the announcement of Japanese support was to be made, Bush lost his dinner on the Japanese Prime Minister. Last I heard the tunnels were being used to grow mushrooms.

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The design I was working on wouldn't have worked, as was made quite clear during the workshop.