Whenever Catch-22 is mentioned, I'm always too late to post this story where more people might see it so I'm dropping it on your lap.
I was a medic in the Army (never saw combat, discharged for smoking pot) and part of our training involved earning an EMT license. Every day, from like 8 am until 6 pm, we were in class studying to pass the official test. One day, our company commander hatched a brilliant idea to ensure that our company would have the highest test scores in the entire battalion: force everyone to study for an additional hour after we got back to the barracks. They made us sit outside, rain or shine, and read from our textbooks for an hour. This might have been a good idea, except there was already a mandatory battalion study hall for underperformers so it was somewhat redundant.
This made it difficult to do laundry or ensure that the barracks were clean (not to mention relax with a movie or hit the gym), and as a result we were frequently punished for failure to maintain our person and barracks. The only way to keep up with everything was to use your already meager sleeping time to do your laundry or take care of your assigned chores, which was technically against the rules and would get you punished if you were caught. Periodically the overnight sergeant would tell us, with a nod and a wink, that he wouldn't be keeping too close of an eye on the laundry room that night.
As you can imagine, morale and overall performance plummeted as we had completely lost faith in our leadership. We already had a low opinion of them, because they were constantly forgetting to schedule us for the chow hall or the PT field, and so we constantly went hungry or wound up doing PT on the hard gravel of the chow hall parking lot while the civilian contractors who worked on the base tried to find parking spaces around us.
Our test scores dropped like a rock. PT scores were dismal, and we were constantly found asleep at the fire guard desk. We were the worst performing company by a wide, wide margin. More and more people were failing, and coming dangerously close to being recycled (sent to a different company that was just starting out so they could re-do the EMT course). And bear in mind, all of the other companies in our battalion were doing fine. They had leisure time and they openly mocked us when they walked past our company training area while we sat in the drizzling rain trying to get some sleep with our books propped open on our laps. People began failing tests on purpose so they could be assigned to the official battalion-wide study hall, which was held indoors, because then they would at least be dry and warm.
We pointed out the obvious flaws of this experiment and the cadre just called us whiners. So we hatched an idea of our own: fail the next test on purpose. Not everybody participated, but we brought back enough 0s to make our point. Our commander, realizing the stupidity of the one-hour study session, scrapped that plan and replaced it with a two-hour study hall.
Eventually, the last day of EMT class arrived, which meant the last day of study hall. My buddy comes up to me before we march back to the barracks and says he has an idea: he found a nook behind some vending machines where we could hang out and smoke cigarettes. That sounded pretty dull but it was the principle of the matter that appealed to me. I was eager for any chance to get one past the cadre at that point. If anyone noticed that we were missing, they would just assume that we were at the official battalion study hall.
We got pretty bored sitting back there and eventually we were forced to entertain ourselves by reading from our textbooks. Two hours later, we made our way back to the barracks only to discover that our commander had canceled the final study hall session and the rest of our company had been on personal time while the two of us had sat shivering behind some vending machines.