Ridiculous Decisions: Part One

It is surprising that a number of quiet senior and intelligent people under pressure can be quite ridiculous in the orders they issue to their subordinates. A few years ago there was a municipal commission who was as usual an IAS officer. That year once there were very heavy rains and the entire city was flooded. The roads were blocked and no one could go anywhere. The doctors also could not move to the hospital for work and only doctors residing in the hospital were able to carry on the emergency work. They declared a two-day holiday to all municipal employees retrospectively, since they had not been able to go to work anyway. However the minister came under flak for this decision as there was a lot of work of cleaning up the city still not done. As a result he asked the commissioner to take appropriate measures, who passed an order making every municipal employee worked on everyday including Sundays. There was no point in making office workers work on Sundays, as there was no work related to flood relief. There are no patience in some parts of the hospital on Sundays, and none ever in departments like Anatomy and preclinical subjects. The actual work involved the cleaning of the mess on the roads, and treating medical disorders arising out of floods. I had no work as a gynecologist, because that part of the work in the hospital was handled by one consultant every Sunday, and was unchanged by the floods. The correct order should have been making related people work instead of calling everyone on duty, whether there was work to be done or not. There was not a single Dean in the three medical colleges who could tell the commissioner that it was a wrong order. After a few Sunday’s like this the order was canceled. The commissioner probably took it out on the people working under him, when he received flak. There was no maturity in the decision, nor any logic.