Being An Analyst in Intelligence

"Elizabeth had learned years ago that analysis had to do with taking the flow of information that moved through the bureaucracy and preventing it from moving in its normal way through the old channels. Sometimes she collected tidbits and left them lying around for weeks until they made sense, and sometimes she merely scanned the printouts and knew that there was nothing in them but distractions. If you had an "In" box and an "Out" box, you were treating information the way it was meant to be treated, which was the wrong way. The system put you here to process paper, but you had to resist the system in order to make it work.

"She put her purse in the "In" box so that nobody would deliver anything there."


p. 247-8, Thomas Perry, Sleeping Dogs

Also, p. 299: "...it was sort of an FBI agent's sense of humor. ...they're in a mostly male sort of world, so most of the jokes are inside jokes, and the ones that aren't are kind of simple."