Deal fatigue
|
The point at which the tedium of an activity becomes intolerable, such it dawns on you that ditch that you have been stubbornly insisting you will, and must, die in, is in point of fact a meaningless rut on the side of an ugly hill leading to nowhere in particular, and there is more fun to be had to threaten to die in another ditch, on another hill, on another day.
Commercial transactions all have a point of deal fatigue — it is more or less linear — at which point everyone goes sod it, forgets about typos, gives preposterous indemnities and just signs the damn contract.
By contrast, bureaucratic tasks imposed by middle management cannot reach the point of deal fatigue. The potential “fatigue curve” for bureaucratic tasks is curved into a new dimension of tedial space-time but in flat three dimensional geometry of normal boredom is asymptotic. It gets close — very, very close — to that line, but never crosses it.