Just to make sure I get this right - to make sure their team wouldn't get overwhelmed with work (how exactly? It's not like the demand for cable wiring would be too different at the end of a year in a frictionless system) they not only decided to create busywork for other departments, but this design also blew up impacting the entire company? Do you know if there were any consequences for whoever created this monstrosity?

No, this is every day in Chase. They are basically the McDonalds of the financial services industry - everybody works there at least once, most people move on to better things, what you have left are the ones who know they will never succeed anywhere else. We convinced one manager at Chase that the reason her application crashed so much was because there wasn't enough gigawatts to power the flex capacitors. The guy who they hired for IT security in my department was a bricklayer who ran around with a dog-eared copy of Computer Security For Dummies trying to find out where we were hiding the NFS so he could turn it off (we kept telling him we didn't use NFS and he didn't believe us, so the hunt continued). Probably the worst story was this really portly fellow who couldn't fit into the bathroom stalls, and was too lazy to walk across the floor to the bathroom that had a handicap stall he could fit in, so he would just sort of stand in front of the stall door and cut loose, and every night some poor cleaning lady had to deal with that and it didn't raise any eyebrows at all. Sounds like an NBC sitcom, but it was real, places like this really do exist, stuff like this really does happen.

Sounds less NBC and more (in fact exactly) like It’s Always Sunny. Specifically Charlie in the mailroom with Pepe Sylvia, and the pissing thing is just classic Frank.