[msie]

It seems to me that many bureaucrats are just blindly following a set of rules laid out for them and they are afraid of bending the rules for fear of getting reprimanded.

This reminds me of two things I saw on Hacker News. One was some TED talk which mentioned a hospital janitor who knew when to bend the rules when cleaning around grieving relatives. The other item was some study that demonstrated that if experts were to follow a set of instructions for a task that they themselves wrote, then they would fail at that task.