It's only a state of mind.

The movie Brazil is about a guy named Sam Lowry who lives in a distopic future and searches for love amidst the pervasive government bureaucracy. Plumbers are just extortionists with paperwork. No one's seen what a refund check looks like for at least a generation, because there hasn't been a need to issue one for that long. Things are grimly efficient, but at the exact same time, they are wrong. They are so wrong that it makes them unreliable even in their complex sophistication. Everyone simply changes their expectations of reliability and calls it a day. Oh well.

At the beginning of the film, a bug enters the system, and no one knows how to cope with the irreversible effects caused by the system malfunction. Sometimes, I remember Brazil, and work is so much like that it's terrifying.