I wish they had intentions that were that noble. Everyone on the likes to pretend that rules and regulations are either a) a boondoggle net-negative exercise i

I wish they had intentions that were that noble. Everyone on the likes to pretend that rules and regulations are either a) a boondoggle net-negative exercise in cost cutting b) "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" depending on whether they like the procedure or regulation in question. Reality is often far more mundane and dysfunctional. It's frequently just speculative bike shedding and ass-covering, exactly the kind of "pointing out exploits" stuff the HN crowd loves to engage in when it comes to policy as though organizational policy was a firewall to configure. Here's how it probably went down: Some people were hammering out the language of a contract and some bike-shedder replied to all pointing out that breaks, work stoppages, lunch, etc, etc, were all being counted but bathroom breaks weren't and that potentially created an exploit to the proposed system of cost/time/whatever tracking. No party had the balls to take responsibility and say "this is silly, we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it" bathroom breaks wound up incorporated that into their formula. So thanks to some bike-shedder trying to "contribute" and nobody's willingness to take any risk whatsoever (by going on the record brushing aside a petty concern that could come back to bite them) everyone has to track their piss breaks. And to be fair, all these people are doing exactly what they are incentivized to do (!!!). And these aren't the kind of things you can roll back later because then you have to explain why you're a) deviating from established way of doing things and b) accepting some risk in doing so which nobody wants to do for a variety of reasons that have been discussed at length and are outside the scope of this comment. Source: This crap happens like quarterly in my workplace. Edit: of course there's other potential complications that can effect these kinds of things but you get the gist.