Universities and bureaucrats

Some of the reasons why I'm considering business career instead of academic one is the bureaucracy I found so far in every university (UCSD has a b., but it seems to work better than usual). Most of the bureaucracy is self-inflected (ie., created by the institution itself), but not all. The sheer stupidity of most administrative workers, though, is clearly not necessary and drives me crazy. I will give you an example based on a real story - my first grant.
My boss told me to apply for a GAUK grant (Charles University grant agency, grants for its students). I did not need the money - I'm doing theory, I need a pan and paper (or steamy bathroom with mirrors). Yet, it is good to have a grant on your CV, especially if you apply for a grant, and one needs to start somewhere.
I really did not need the money, so I wrote it carelessly. My colleagues needed the money, so they wrote it carefully. I won. I got the money for calendar year 2007, and they were available in June 2007. Quite late for summers school of summer conference, especially because I was leaving to San Diego in September and had to be present in Prague in August for visa and (an)other paperwork.
Nevertheless, I was able to use the money. The thing is that there are always strings attached to the grants, so you can't really use the money the way you want (or you consider moral). But you certainly have to use it all, no matter what.
The "fun" part comes now. I have to write final report (which I knew) and so I did. The deadline set by university is April 1, by faculty March 25th and I was informed about the latter. However, the CERGE-EI decided that it's students are stupid and thus they need to submit the final report a week earlier to CERGE-EI (it's not a faculty). It did not really tell anybody - they posted information about new round of grants (for 2008) in October 2007 (five months ago!), to which they attached a Word document, at the end of which they posted one line saying that the deadline for final reports of the previous round is March 17.
In contrast to the faculty (FSV), they did not bothered to send an email about that. Instead, they waited till the deadline was over and then they sent a threating email to us who missed the deadline (AFAIK, all of us).
Moreover, they required that we submit three copies in print and a CD/floppy disk in person. This is not only impossible (I'm in San Diego, and I really don't have $2,5000 to spare to get right now to Prague), but utterly ridiculous. The report for faculty and university is to be submitted via very simple web form, it is about 2 pages of text. If you send it by email, they can print it by pressing "Print", they don't really need you to bring it.
So I'm supposed to fulfill deadline I wasn't told about, that has no standing in the grant contract, that is utterly stupid and I'm being threatened that if I don't do it, something bad happens.
I don't want to be bothered in my life with things like this. I will have to deal with government, which is equally stupid and similarly inefficient, I don't need to meet another group of useless people (ineffective administrative workers) and their stupid rules.
P.S. Why am I so sensitive about a missed deadline? I don't know. I probably think that the world would be a better place if all people did the things they are supposed to do in time. I certainly try hard to do that. But it requires that I'm told about the deadline.