I keep saying that many of the bad decisions in my state company are actually due to managers brought in from the private economy who have no clue about the technical complexities and inter-dependencies of a railway and have been selected foremost for their willingness to fulfil IMF-advised austerity plans by firing people.

Sadly, the pattern doesn't quite hold for the manager who killed us: this guy climbed the hierarchy from a normal railway job and has technical knowledge. But as manager he is apparently an unscrupulous careerist, and he did worse than killing us: he is also abolishing the company branch he himself came from, firing several technical experts in the process. (He tried to delegate the latter: the branch boss was forced into retirement, and his successor was told that his sole job will be the firings. That successor told thanks but no thanks and returned to his old job.) These firings are even more senseless than ours. The more charitable version is that this is to please the CEO (an accountant...) who thinks the railway can be operated without experts who step in when something goes wrong.

Also, this manager is no change to his non-railway "imported" peers in heading a bureaucracy at the headquarters that would be a much better target for cost-saving measures. I mean lots of people in jobs like purchasing, accounting, controlling, compliance or legal matters who are busy running through the corridors with files but need four months to sign off a 1000-word contract that is mostly copy-and-paste standard text. A colleague of us who was fired in July and accepted an intra-company new job offer there got the enmity of the new colleagues for doing what they do in half a year in two weeks.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}