Any department at a university will have tons of bureaucratic procedures one must complete in order to do anything from hang a message board in the hallway to purchase an expensive piece of equipment. My department is no different, although the bureaucracy is tolerable. That doesn't mean there aren't times when you need to thumb your nose at the whole system. For instance, when requesting that a purchase be paid for by grant money, we are required to provide both a description of the product purchased and the purpose of the product. Sometimes the description pretty much sums up the purpose. This is one of those times:
I was this close to writing, "So there aren't flies all throughout the building."
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Awesome... simply awesome.
I enjoy filling out "Sole Source" forms to justify purchasing expensive equipment from a particular supplier without having to obtain quotes from multiple suppliers. Usually I write something like this: "Our justification for purchasing this equipment from this supplier without obtaining multiple quotes is that the particular features of the equipment manufactured by this particular supplier are required by our experimental goals, and this supplier is the only one who can provide the equipment with those necessary features."
In other words: "This is the only supplier we can use because this is the only supplier we can use." So far, I have never had any push-back from the purchasing department. I doubt they even read these things.