| I work with a lot of government departments. The "policy" is not a thing that can enforce itself, and often barely exists at all. Rarely is it actually written down! Mostly these things boil down to a vetocracy where all managers in some hierarch must say 'yes', otherwise a single 'no' is a final 'no'. Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say 'no'. The manager in that office you worked in most likely made a decision themselves and didn't punt it up the hierarchy, and hence nobody told him 'no'. The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting. PS: It's hilarious to see this effect play out as a consultant, because often I deal with different "randomly" selected subsets of the same organisation and the difference in their day-to-day can be stark. It just boils down to which managers take individual responsibility, and which regularly beg for permission to do their job. "No." |
So in my case at IBM the trick to being able to keep a hand-and-a-half sword in your office is to just have it appear there one day. My boss did a bit of a double-take the first time he saw it but that was the only reaction I got.
They did have a "no firearms in the building" policy but that didn't extend to medieval edged weapons, although there may have been a change made after I left.