Maintain the Balance (or go MAD)

Tom Lehrer wrote in the song "Who's Next"

First we've got the bomb and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then, Russia got the bomb, but that's O.K.,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way.
Who's Next?

Mr. Lehrer spoke, of course, of the Atomic Bomb, the fear of Nuclear Weapons proliferation, and invention of that absurd theory, which is probably what kept the world alive until now, of Mutually Assured Destruction, with the aptly acronym MAD. "The balance of power" Lehrer called it. The idea that fear of my own (assured) destruction would deter me from taking an action that would assure my enemy's destruction (modern Nuclear Weapons do come with an "Assured Destruction Certification", apparently). It's a good theory, and like I said, as long as sane people were at the button it worked. I use "Sane" as in "understand the implication of starting a nuclear war"-sane not "Sane" as "Hi, I'm Stalin, I feel like killing a couple of million of my own people today because it's possible they will look at me funny someday in a parade"-sane. This theory fails today because nuclear weapons have new kind of owners. Their Sanity is limited to "let's fire this thing and God (-Allah, Jesus, or the minor Goddess of "things lost in drawers" * ) will handle the rest and assure my Heavenly eternity" brand of sane.

But that's not what I want to say.

Something that happened at work got me thinking of the "Balance" line of the song. Lehrer speaks of the balance of power. I'm thinking of the The Balance of Stupid. It is my conclusion that if there is a balance for everything in the universe, then there is also a Balance of Stupid that must be maintained.
In a previous ranting I spoke of a programmer that I referred to as the Old Man. Nothing against old (older) people, I swear. I know of Old thirty-some years old and Young of sixty-some years. This man simply programmed like it was 1986. I program likes is 1996, and in our line of work even that is soon-to-be-old. But nevermind the aging tangent.
This man was fired ("and there was much rejoicing") a couple of months ago. We were dancing among the cubicles and chanting Yey-chants to all the small gods we could think of. I got responsibility for all the items he was in charge of, and the imagination soared. I felt uplifted (I'm not kidding). My head literally dizzy with all the neat things I will finally do the software. The software module in question is our infrastructure and there were about 6 years of neglect. People, including me, had to come up with their own solutions to problems that could be solved in a central (infrastructural) manner.
I'm going on and on to try and explain my excitement (albeit a professional excitement, I am, indeed, a geek). I thought that all my frustration was over. No more blank stares from someone who could not follow simple logic (he actually said once "I can't do that for you, it requires logic"!). No more idiotic solutions to the wrong problems. No more waiting two years for a month's worth of work. Utter bliss.

And in that euphoric state of mind, I was blindsided.

My other major project right now is a Linux migration. I'm supervising an outsourcing of the work by another company.
And there, waiting, was another old man.
Another man who doesn't believe in order, or neatness.
Another man who doesn't listen.
Another man who could call me with the same question three times because he doesn't like my answers, and then goes ahead and does what he wants anyway.
Hence the Balance of Stupid is maintained. My original conclusion was that we need to find a way to shift the Balance of Stupid in the right way, so the weight falls on unimportant things. Then I realized that whenever you have to cover for somebody's stupidity, that specific task turns to supreme importance, so a shifting attempt is futile.

Suffer stupidity in quite (it's impossible, I tried).
Nothing left but to suck it up!

So I am left with only this small wish: I hope that I'm not someone else's Balance of Stupid.

Although I probably am. If so, I apologize.