Theirs is a planet where time moves slowly and gently from one large file into another one, with little thought that any of it might affect real lives.
They obviously know that it does, but they are able to compartmentalise – to separate their work from life outside.
If they didn't, they would probably find everything too upsetting and frustrating to continue their work.
This perception came to the fore again last week when we heard there is to be a delay over the improvement works on the A1307 at Alington Terrace, Horseheath, where two teenage girls have died in accidents while crossing the road.
If you remember, it was difficult to persuade Cambridgeshire County Council that anything needed doing at all, even after the first accident where Imogen Barker died.
Finally the council agreed to do some minor adjustments – a slip road and a pedestrian island.
Since the accidents I have been only too aware of how poor the visibility for drivers is at the top of that hill, and you would think a warning sign that pedestrians might be crossing on a blind summit would have been something quick and simple which could have been done.
Nevertheless, it has been agreed that these improvements will be done – but only to be carried out 18 months after the accident.
Then, as many might have predicted, we had another tragedy, when Alice Westland died.
The work was due to have started this month, but now it will not because it has been discovered that there is a fibre-optic cable under the road belonging to BT.
Discovered.
Don't they have any maps? Don't they look at them when this sort of thing is costed out?
I mean, it's not like a Victorian sewage pipe – that could be overlooked after 150 years.
But a fibre-optic cable has not been put in very long ago, one would imagine, yet no one, apparently, knew it was there.
That doesn't matter, of course, in council-world, because someone can talk to BT and negotiate what to do. It'll give someone something to do.
Meanwhile the file gets bigger and the danger of a further accident is always there.
That's something we try not to think about in council-world.
If this was the private sector, a person who failed to realise something which meant that an order was completed several months late, would probably be disciplined if not sacked for incompetence, because the client's business would be lost from then on.
But when it is the public in general who are your clients, nobody seems to care, because you can't lose their business.
What are the chances that when this work is finished we will find it's a bit like the island the council was persuaded to install on the A1307 in Abington, and which seems to have been a factor in several accidents since, one fatal.
Nobody seems to be that bothered about that either.
It's probably rather a bit of luck for them because the work had been done and the file virtually closed, but now it's open again.
People are complaining, there will be further investigation and, eventually, something else might have to be done, even if it's only removing the island.
But, as Flanders and Swann so memorably put it – It All Gives Work For The Working Man To Do.
And while there is work to do, jobs are justified, so there is no chance of some mad councillors coming into power and looking critically at staffing levels.
Staff are needed to make sure jobs are done expeditiously and without unnecessary mistakes causing delay.