Watch out for the one who lives to throw a wrench in the works.

I have this idea. Rather than having the nuclear codes reside in the White House, they should embed with the American people on a rotating basis. Not unlike the Stanley Cup, which overnights in each offseason residence of the members of the NHL championship team. Do the same with the car keys to obliteration; move them from place to place nightly. Think of the possibilities: who will have the effrontery to keep up with the Joneses, especially when they have the power to unleash Armageddon with one push of a button? There goes the neighborhood, indeed. Think twice before criticizing their taste in wainscoting. Consider if the nuclear football kicked off in a house with Polish heritage and a long memory, still seething over the “stolen” Russian win in the gold medal game of the 1972 Olympic basketball tournament. Revenge is a dish best served with beer and hors d’oeuvres, watching live cable, and Poles do not fancy Russians. Talk about checks and balances. What could possibly go wrong with this exercise of grassroots democracy?

Now contemplate the person who makes a career at Underwriters Laboratories. A different kind of soulless annihilation.

Why do people want to work for Underwriters Laboratories? An existential question if ever there were one. What thought process propels UL into focus when mapping one’s career path? Once hired, what launches ULers from their beds each morning, zealous to certify that products won’t explode, impale, eviscerate or otherwise maim the user? What prompts certain individuals keen to become grade school crossing guards of the mind and be content with that role for life? Does the meticulous completion of forms have an aphrodisiacal effect? Absent prodigious financial reward or immense political power, what else moves these people?

One word: leverage.

Call it the horn-rimmed glasses theory of motivation, coercive subgroup; or, what if Betty Crocker became Supreme Ruler? What if Sr. Mary Ignatius, the Nun of Your Worst Nightmares (the one starring in your dream, in which you didn’t study for the final exam, and she is the proctor, and corporal punishment is still allowed; indeed, encouraged), making unwanted cameo appearances in your adulthood – complete with disciplinary staff and 12-foot rosary, took charge? For starters, listeners hearing the rules would surely sit up straight, pay attention, color between the lines, not smack gum, and sweat a lot. UL enforcement types bring their own brand of tough love. Some people live for that.

Pinch points punctuate life. They are often managed by small people, from small backgrounds, with small prospects. And large axes to grind. Those metaphorical green eyeshades, with a gimlet eye for waywardness. Ruling their particular drawbridge is their one break in life, to be a troll and leave a mark. If upstream people in the value chain resent the work stoppage, so be it. They are on the map. Those who know the built-in stress delivery in their lowly positions can seize the opportunity. The rules are the rules, and somebody needs to enforce them. Might as well be the 12th child of an impoverished family with a lifetime accumulation of resentment, longing for payback and awaiting the chance to strike. Show me your papers. None dare call it revenge. But the quiet, unassuming clerk whose childhood was marked by beatings and bullying does. Now is his time. He aims to use it well.

Another word: control.

Like accounts receivable. A staple of electronics behemoths is the overseas accounting department. Third-party payment systems proliferate in lands where English is the second language. Staffing is cheaper overseas. Time zones build in delay in responding to urgent queries. Rejection of improper forms, the default option, adds to the delay. Overseas accounting departments excel at rigidly adhering to rules: if so much as a digit is dropped from a purchase order number on an invoice, or line items do not correspond precisely, to the last semicolon, in the original purchase order, the supplier’s invoice goes to purgatory (pending corrected reissuance) or hell (rejected altogether). The additional overlay of third parties and language mangling adds more layers of complication, confusion and infuriation. Corporate cash flow is artificially enhanced for additional weeks and sometimes months while documents are redone and interest, conveniently, accumulates. It doesn’t take many roadblocks or much institutional effort to transform net 30 to net 90. The unseen souls have the last word, and accounting gets an attaboy from Corporate.

Like quality department approval. After six months of successful high-intensity failure analysis activity, somebody in the customer organization awakens to the fact that the vendor quality management paperwork is incomplete or nonexistent. Another lowly soul is deputized to send multiple forms, average length 20 pages each, for completion. Representations and certifications. Quality surveys. IT security self-audits. The body of billable work performed thus far does not exempt the applicant from certain paperwork obligations. No mercy. And the lowly soul’s job is to enforce the rules. Which she does with a vengeance. Calls every day to the Customer Service Manager, asking for updates and status reports. Just like her bosses inflict upon her. One miserable supply chain of anxiety.

Like persistent program managers. The second deputy vice under-program analyst (third class) II, quote division. Which is a misnomer because half the time they have no idea what is in front of them to analyze. Numbers to supply a spreadsheet for others to decide. No technical expertise needed or required. The second deputy vice under-program analyst (third class) II gathers quotes. Ten of them. They terrorize the delinquent supplier to move faster and be the low bidder. All while management screams at them to move even faster because some salesperson made an inconsiderate and unsupportable commitment to the end-customer to deliver earlier than requested, and nobody possessed the knowledge or the guts to stand up and ask why the constricted timeline to produce a quote was mandatory. A manufactured crisis. Which explains why the supplier hears promptly each morning, by phone, fax and email, from the second deputy vice under-program analyst (third class) II, who is very good at what she does.

Like portals. Another product of distant lands (“Great news! We have a new system to make business transactions with us more efficient and less time-consuming.” Begging the question, what made the previous system less efficient and more time-consuming?). Far-off anonymous coders have created a virtual impenetrable wall, which can only (sometimes) be accessed by a combination of multiple passwords, multifactor authentication and endless security questions (“What was your first pet’s home street’s owner’s wedding venue’s maiden name?”). Intuition fails in navigating the new system. Very little patience for the travails of the supplier, who, through setup and implementation of his mouth of the portal, expends unbillable hours of his life that will never be recovered. All the product of a small, henpecked man in a dark room, somewhere overseas, whom one will never meet. But his revenge is complete. And he is content with his work.

Like credit cards in lieu of account setup. Another large company plague. Mammoth Semiconductor Corporation needs a CT scan overnight. Anxious engineers claim their supplier onboarding system (sounds like a search and rescue department) is too ponderous and time-consuming to bother with. And they need that CT scan. Hence the universal question, “Do you accept credit cards?” This avoids the minions. Minions live on yet another continent (not synched to the speed of anxiety). And they like fine print. All of which take time to generate. And read. And approve. And languish.

Like corporate moles. Deep in the bowels of many large corporations lurk employees who actually believe that written procedures, crafted over decades, must be followed. To. The. Letter. Never mind the time spent observing their rules meticulously. So, project urgency becomes a relative term. One person’s hot job needs to be completed in two weeks, while the next wants two days, and a third expects two years (assuming all paperwork has been signed off and necessary validations are performed). A year and a half ago, we notified a major medical OEM of the pending mothballing of a certain aging, obsolete test platform. We gave them 13 months’ notice of a date certain for discontinuation. No response for eight of those 13 months. Then they woke up. And they panicked. In notifying them well in advance, we were only playing by the rules.

Like cowards. Program managers and salespersons who are easily cowed by the customer. Perhaps the product of too many management-by-intimidation table-pounding sessions where demands are made – bellowed, actually – and agreed to out of fear more than rational evaluation of their feasibility? Fear of losing one’s job or one’s customer. Demands that, to borrow an AS9100 term, “flow down” to the supplier. That would be us, at the base of the flow. Our job is to make the embattled program manager a hero by furnishing a miracle.

Scripture talks of the Pearl of Great Price, in which an irritant transforms to something of enduring beauty. Here we speak of the Irritant of Great Cost. Analogous processes; different results. White hair and stomach acid.

Beware the quiet guy in the corner who isn’t making eye contact. To him you’re a bullseye, and he runs the world.

Robert Boguski is president of Datest Corp. (datest.com); rboguski@datest.com. His column runs bimonthly.