Pending Approval Hats

Somewhere in every organisation there is a system that exists to give you back money you have already spent, and it has been designed — apparently deliberately — to make that as slow and humiliating as possible. You paid for the thing. You have proof. You are now filling in a field called 'business justification'. The genius of the expense report is that it inverts the relationship. You are out of pocket, and yet somehow you are the supplicant: attaching, categorising, explaining a fourteen-dollar sandwich to a person who has never met you. The status field says PENDING APPROVAL for weeks, which is not a status so much as a mood. These are pointed at the system, not at finance teams, who are also its victims and are usually just enforcing something they did not design. The target is a workflow. The cruellest detail is the rejection: weeks later, on a technicality, with no guidance about what the right answer would have been. You resubmit. The clock starts again, from the beginning, as though nothing had happened at all.