Work's been pretty frustrating. The new clampdown on "cost controls" has made it basically impossible to buy anything, even something so small as a desktop UPS, without going through two levels of management approvals. We're spending more money making sure we don't waste money than the money we save. Idiocy. What makes it doubly annoying is the whole idea of "costs savings" for us. If we actually manufactured a product or sold a consumer level service, and used the revenues to feed back into the business, it makes sense to say "the slowed economy has reduced our cash flow, and so we need to cut back". But we don't. We're an R&D company. We are given possibilities from our upstairs masters, and say "we think we can turn this into a product, it will cost N dollars to find out". At which point we are sometimes told "go ahead and try, here is the money". But having them later come back and say, "keep working on the same stuff, but we're not giving you as much money to do it with", well that means that either projects will fail, will be cut back, will go slower, or will actually consume more money to succeed, or some combination of all 4.

Why is it that every geek and tech-head in the world knows this, and apparently not a single corporate executive in the Western world is able to grasp such a basic concept? What the hell do people study when they get those precious MBA's?