I’m Alex, the author of the articles on this site. This is Admin SNAFU, where I publicly rant and occasionally inform on topics I have mostly begrudgingly learned about.

How this Site Came to Be

I detest administrative work. If I didn’t have to review another insurance policy or painstakingly update all my accounts with a new credit card number/mailing address/email address ever again, I would be a happy man. To my dismay, though, wherever there is a vacuum of administrative acumen, it seems I am doomed to fill it. I have a high administrative vapour pressure, if you will. Over the years I have become entangled with a rather long list of administratively dysfunctional organizations. A school board, a ski hill, some high tech firms, logging companies, safety regulators, insurers, strata corporations, a municipality, and the CRA are some of the highlights.

As much as I detest admin work, I am a pragmatist. Sometimes the only path to a goal is by grinding through mind-numbing administrative work. If the path happens to be a maze of arcane rules and procedures, I’ll find some way to navigate it. Surprisingly often this leads me down a rabbit hole to a place where reasonable expectations don’t apply, where seemingly straightforward goals are met with unbelievable, utterly senseless, and incomprehensible roadblocks, and where the whole purpose of the bureaucracy is often defeated by the bureaucracy itself.

I learn a great deal from my trips down these rabbit holes. I often find myself repeating my stories to random people who, surprisingly, seem interested despite how boring this stuff is. It seems the lessons I have learned are often useful to others, and applying those lessons means less time down the rabbit hole for them. Maybe that’s why they listen.  Or maybe it’s because of how animated I get. An animated in-person story, however, is not exactly a good reference for others to follow. In a few cases I have found myself typing detailed emails in an an attempt to help that one person through the same gauntlet I navigated. So in the spirit of helping more that just one person at a time I started this blog, and will make the lessons I have learned public by default.