Anomolous Reading
When I used to work in the soul crushing bureaucracy of a community college, we of the proletariat would have to find creative ways of demonstrating against the ruling class without being branded as dissidents and getting ourselves banished to the gulag, also known as the Bookstore. It was in that cold and sterile environment that malcontents would have to move books around and deal with students. During their sentence, many of the disaffected would find employment elsewhere. For the few that survived hard labour, they would return to the relative safety of the office with an outward smile. But everyone knew that inside, they were broken.
So one had to be careful. To effect any kind of meaningful change, nudging the bloated monster of bureaucracy towards a workers' paradise, while at the same time avoiding punishment, it was important to keep one's actions and opinions anonymous. Or at least be able to pin them on someone else. So when my particular autocracy, being one of many within the broader bureaucracy, decided to get HVAC in to see why the programmers had to wear gloves to keep their fingers working in the frigid office, and we found ourselves festooned with completely anonymous sensor gadgets, we viewed it as a sign from above.
It was great fun to sneak up on a sensor and breathe on it. It would make a little light change colour. And when the HVAC engineer showed up to generate graphs of the temperature and humidity there would be all of these little inexplicable spikes at random times. These would be noted as an Anomolous Reading, and were totally disregarded. Overall, the temperature and humidity, when averaged over a two week period so as to eliminate anomolies, was bang on the acceptable range for an office environment. So everyone continued to wear gloves, as a kind of pennance for being slow-witted enough to create warm anomolies to counter the cool anomolies which were the problem.
Over time it became apparent that the building, being somewhat old, had been partitioned in such a way that the heat for our office was being controlled by another office and no one knew who was controlling their heat. So whenever that other office became too warm, which was all winter, they would play with our thermostat, generally setting it very low. Such is life in a bureaucracy.
Anyhow, the takeaway here is that whenever you encounter something you don't understand, you can simply ignore it by considering it to be an Anomolous Reading. Here are some things I don't understand.