No dues blues

I went to hell on Wednesday for my Final Project Review and in the process experienced brain dead bureaucracy at its worst (No I am not talking about the Indian government nor is this post about the project review). This post is about a piece of paper called the “No due Certificate”. This piece of bull shit epitomises everything that is wrong with hell.

Let me first describe this thing to u. It's a piece of paper the usual cheap kind nothing special. There is place to fill in the name of the student, register number, roll no, batch and signature of the student. That is as much as I can fill up as a student in the no due certificate, despite the fact that we are told to fill this thing up and submit it at the time of collecting our hall tickets. Now I am not really keen to have a hall ticket but considering I need to write the final semester exams (Note to myself. Find xerox of books and start studying) I needed to get this “No due Certificate” filled.

This post is about this adventure. See in order to fill in the “no due certificate” one needs to get the following signatures with the words “No due” attached. And the list is painfully long and full of dependencies. Here it is.

Hod

Class counselor

Main library

department library

NCC

Physical education

Office accounts section

Office academic section

Now one is required to collect the form from the office. Nothing unusual or irritating about that but if u ask the accounts or the academic section to sign then they tell u to fill the rest of the NDC and come back to them. How brain dead is that. Why the f*** do I have to make 2 trips to the office. Why can't they sign it first up. Who the hell gave this college ISO certification. May be I should lend my copy of the Xerox of the TQM text book to them. (Note to myself. Look for TQM Xerox)

So I went around looking to fill up the rest of the form.

NCC – Why should I have to get a no dues from the NCC. I've had as much contact with them as a Pope's reproductive organs with the female equivalent (of reproductive organs not pope). I am not a member and have never thought about becoming one. So there is was climbing 2 floors to find the Applied Physics lab to get that signature.

Physical education – It's a well know fact that I get as much exercise as a hibernating bear. There I was climbing 2 floors again to get the signature. Its a conspiracy. All the signature givers seem to be on 2^nd floors of buildings.

Department library – the department libraries were disbanded after the library expansion a hundred years ago. Still I needed to get that filled. (brain dead. This entire process is dumber than a dead dodo). So I had to figure out whom to get the signature from. Considering there was no library to go to. Fortunately some some guy had already filled it up and knew whose signature to get. So I got that done and went looking for my class counselor. But she was no where to be found.

Library – This was rather comfortable considering the AC was working. So got the signature and wanted to hang around for a while but the moment the though occurred to me the power went off and the AC shut down. So I left

Class counselor – It's not very easy trying to get the class counselor's signature when she is in class studying. So I had to wait a long time till her class finished before I got that signature. And in the mean time I couldn't get the signature of the HOD 'coz our man won't sign till everyone else other than the office people sign the NDC.

HOD – At last got his signature and I was done for the day.

I have seem many instances of brain dead rules and procedures in hell but this one has to take the cake. The accounts section has asked everyone to get the signature on the day the hall tickets are going to be given which means there is going to be a huge rush in the office delaying the process of getting the stupid hall ticket and wasting everyone's time.

Ah the sheer brilliance of all this makes me wonder. Who the hell came up with the idea of a no due certificate anyway?