government reporting

I do some federal reporting as part of my job. It seems as if it would be rather straightforward. Pick up this file online. Run this process. Do some other monkey business. Send file back. But it is a process frought with errors for one reason and another. Try as we might, there is always something changing--either the requirements, or the data, or the system, or problems that have been problems since before I even took this job. And ok, well, sometimes there is human error. I am, after all, a human, and part of my processing involves manual jiggling of file headers and file names and file dates, and God save us all if I haven't had coffee that morning. Most of the time, everything is good, everything is cool, but every now and then all hell breaks loose. Or something is just slightly off, and while it may be a tiny glitch for me, it's a major glitch for some poor sap whose data we just reported incorrectly. I am often in repair-the-damage mode and just one step ahead of chaos. The bottom line, here, is that I am totally amazed sometimes that things in this world run as smoothly as they do, that more hell doesn't break loose each and every day. I guarantee I'm not the only one dealing with program bugs and system changes out here in the real world. Or on the flip side, I worry that more hell breaks lose than we ever know about, that some information about *me* somewhere is hopelessly inaccurate, and that I will find out about it at the most inopportune moment. Not to scare you all. Really. Relax. I'm not the person reporting your taxes or anything like that. I used to have an aquaintance who was an airline steward. He told me more potentially dangerous stuff goes on during a flight than the passengers ever know about. Fires in the kitchen, things like that. And I had to start, right then, forgetting that he'd ever told me this.