Your tax dollars at work

I work in a federal agency that just implemented a new travel management system. The old one worked fine at our level (though it wasn't web-based), and no one's quite sure why we changed over, but we did.

A couple weeks ago I attended a function for which my only personal expense was parking, $7. I wasn't even going to do the fifteen minutes work to be reimbursed, but this was my first opportunity to use the new system, so I did. Once I finally got to the submit page (shown), I learned that not only is this a tremendously non-intuitive and convoluted system (one example: the 'My Approvals' doesn't go to travel approvals I've amassed, it points to a page I'm not qualified to use so instead throws an error), it costs us $5 for every single transaction. Even $7 ones. Even $2 ones. This same transaction in the old system was free.

At first I didn't want to submit it, but then thought 'Screw it - if enough people spend $5 to get 7, maybe they'll scrap this POS.' Unfortunately that will likely require a CIO to look at the expenditures and make a decision they either screwed up or didn't have the authority to make in the first place.

Every day I spend here, I swing more toward libertarianism.