No one comes in to work and deliberately tries to make your day bad. Actually, let me amend that slightly - very, very few people come in to work and deliberately try to make your day bad. There is a very small percentage of people who are vindictive, hateful, small minded, petty people (or just plain old psychopaths) who will deliberately come in to work and delight in spreading misery and pain wherever they go. Whether it's to make everyone else feel as miserable as them, or whether it's because they get joy from other's misery, whatever the reason, these people are few and far between. We are not concerned with them.

What we are concerned with are the other 99.99% of the population who aren't raving psychopaths. Who are genuinely nice people, who care about others and would never dream of inflicting pain and suffering; but who proceed to come in to work and make your day rotten anyway. Why would they do that? What turns normal, caring, decent people into mobile misery factories? What makes them hinder, block and frustrate us at every turn?

When you work in a large company, one of the things you hear quite often is “we have to follow the process”. Large companies, for very good reasons, have a need to standardise their processes. If you have 50,000 staff, having one way to do things makes a lot of sense. No matter where someone goes in the organisation, the process for ordering a new pen, or whatever, will be the same. The problem with defined processes though, is that unless they are regularly reviewed and cleaned up, they tend to accumulate complexity. Each time something happens that is just outside the normal way the process works, someone will add some extra checks into the process to make sure that that situation is now covered. Over the years it will collect enough of these extra checks that your carefully considered and streamlined pen ordering process now requires a 10 page form, 15 signatures and about 4 hours (and in some companies a pint of cockerel’s blood). The end result is that everyone spends all day looking for pens.