> Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts)

I think people are unfair to bureaucrats. Bureaucrats have a job to do: they carry out policy determined by other people and encoded via a dizzying array of rules that combine specificity and vagueness in unexpected ways, many of which have a history of harm, exploitation, and public debate behind them that ordinary people have no patience to learn.

People are only interested in their own situation, and they are convinced that their situation is different. Sometimes it is. Sometimes they're suffering from an entirely natural partiality towards themselves. So they want the bureaucrat to be creative. They justify it by saying that the rules can be bent just for this circumstance, just for them, it doesn't have to apply to any other circumstance. Why can't the bureaucrat relax their rigid bureaucratic brain enough to realize that every circumstance is unique and the rules were written for other circumstances, not this one?

But that's exactly what the bureaucrat is not supposed to do. The public, their elected representatives, their interest groups, and other policy stakeholders expend incredible quantities of time in campaigns, pubic debate, open meetings, closed meetings, collection and collation of feedback, et cetera ad infinitum. It's not the bureaucrat's place to second-guess the results of that process or innovate outside the bounds decided on during that process.

In the gray areas within those boundaries, yes, the bureaucrat is happy to listen to arguments and make decisions based on reason and evidence. That's their job. Gray areas where bureaucrats get to apply judgment are inevitable, often even intentional, but the gray areas aren't always where you want or expect them to be. Bureaucrats don't have latitude to decide that a rule that went through two rounds of public feedback, got debated until 11pm at a public meeting, went through multiple rounds of drafting and review by the staff of an elected official, and was finally signed off on and announced as a shiny new policy in the media, should be changed for you because the way it applies to your situation doesn't make sense to you. They can't invent a gray area where the political process provided a bright line.

You can argue that a lot of rules were hastily dashed out by a junior aide and made it through the rest of the policy-making process without any further scrutiny. That's true. But it's not like when you become a bureaucrat they give you a special pair of glasses that show you which rules were just one person's ill-informed guess and which rules emerged from decades of painful history or hours of public debate and compromise. That would be nice to know, and sometimes bureaucrats know that information because they were around and paying attention when the rules were made. Sometimes they can bend a rule because they know that this particular rule is not important to anybody. But just because they won't bend a rule in your case doesn't mean they're narrow-minded, stubborn, or petty.