I realized today that bureaucrats can either be incredibly helpful or incredibly unhelpful, and usually nothing in between. However, unlike many professionals, bureaucrats are easy to win over to your side. As a physicist, trying to get a professor to help you out in some way usually requires you to impress them with your knowledge of physics, past research work, name-dropping, or feigning interest in their pet projects. If you act it out convincingly, they will consider it worth their time to do your favor (even if it's actually required of them anyway, like signing a yearly review of your progress). Bureaucrats, like the people who arrange room schedules, run Scantron machines, print copies of tests and quizzes...all of them will usually do what you want if you just show some old-fashioned politeness.

I'm serious.

I'm not even saying you have to fake interest in their lives. You just have to be patient and courteous, and thank them for their service, and that's it. Then, when there IS some problem where you need something fast or there is some red tape frustrating you, they can clear it all away when they remember how polite you were. I'm not the most friendly or outgoing of people, and yet my quizzes (from TAing) are always graded first (often within 15 mins of me dropping them off), while I hear complaints from other grad students about waiting days for their results. When I ask for a room, or some equipment, I get it right away, no paperwork, no questions asked. And all I do is thank them as I leave their office. I imagine that being a bureaucrat is a very thankless job; you tend to see people when things are NOT going well, and they are angry. DMV workers, secretaries, and basically anyone who handles lots of forms and paperwork is like this.

I'm not a huge fan of bureaucracy; it's slow and unwieldy. But it is a necessary evil in today's world. Perhaps in the future there will be little need for it as computers take over the field. For today, we need to accept it. And be polite, because if you are not, they can make things take a REALLY long time, and screw you over.