A very apt description, David, And follows what I see in the world very closely. Sums up exactly why I refuse management positions. I don't mind taking lead roles, but it would only take 6 months or so (maybe longer) to start forgetting all the gotcha's that need to be considered.

For your statement:

I don't know how it works in the USA but in Britain there is a horribly short sited attitude that demands a cheap temporary fix that lasts forever.

It's no different here. A temporary solution is put into place to get though, then as long as that's working, regardless the consequences, it's just left there until it becomes a critical situation again. After a few of these, nothing works right anymore, and the whole IT shop is scrambling to patch the patches and repair data errors created by the patch which was not designed to be permenant to start with, and they all say then that they don't have the time to look at anything else, and we have what I call an IT department of firefighters. What's really bad is when they start hiring more IT people, or buying more and upgraded hardware, to handle the ever increasing load of these, rather than just fix the thing. I used to think that eventually they would learn, but now I have decided that they have the learning capacity of a rock. Sometimes, I wonder if they handle things the same at home. Wait until the shelves are completely empty to go to the grocery store, wait until they run out of gas on the freeway to go to the gas station, wait until they are in the final statges of dying to get treated for a disease, wait until the divorce is final to make up with their spouse, etc....

Somehow I doubt it, but that brings up the question of why do they do it at work then? Is it because they are not personally affected? Have no accountability? I don't think I'll ever understand that mentality, as I'm strongly based in logic.

I have a document I wrote a while back that I use for situations such as these. It simply states, I, _______________, understand the consequences of this decision, and after being advised by my technical resource against it, have chosen to do it anyway, and take full responsibility. and then a signature line. When stupid things start occurring, I present the document to my manager, and request he sign it. I justify it to them with, I refuse to take responsibility for things beyond my control, and you just removed this from my control. Amazingly, its never been signed, but generates a huge amount of discussion on the current topic, and generally gets a new decision made.