Too much of a good thing

Yawn. All the shared drives at work are having issues. No access to documents, templates, tools and files. It's not making for much of a productive day (especialy since I went back to my podiatrist this morning and so was in late. Have I told you lately how much I love my podiatrist? Sorry, that's another post. But at least now I can hopefully stop whingeing about my toes and write something interesting).
So I've been sitting here doing a job that we're all in the process of going through, and changing all my work files over into the approved stationary / files for the new building.
Now I'm a pretty organised person when it comes to my work. Everything is filed - and generally in an order that might make sense to most people, not just me. I have a collection of manuals for systems I use, suspension files in a locked filing cabinet for more sensitive stuff, and in-trays with neat manila folders for stuff I use regularly.
So now I'm busy taking all my stuff out of a perfectly good filing system and putting it into a new one.
You can imagine how thrilling I'm finding that.

There hasn't even been much of an explanation given for why we might all have to spend hours re-filing every scrap of paper ever kept by the 4000-odd staff moving into the new building. There have been a fe mumblings about the size of the new desks, but I would have thought that that would be my own problem if I can't fit all my stuff there? Do you think there was some sort of filing expert that came in and assessed all the different roles and methods of filing that everyone had and came up with a solution that suited everyone (or even most people)?

In fact, now that I come to think of it, there's actually a fair bit of stuff that refers to things I have done through the company, filed in very nice company branded lever-arch folders. Of course these aren't approved for the new building so they'll have to be re-filed.

I'm sure that standardising is a good thing in a great many cases, but I think we have here a case of ill-conceived bureaucracy. Sure "let's just get everyone to use the same 2 types of folders. Then it will all look really neat and tidy in the cupboards" sounds like a good idea in theory. But did anyone actually think it through?

Grrr.

J.