You know, the one that's across the whole public service and that's been going on for two years.

And I was like, really? We still doing this? After two years? Seriously?

Public servants and their families are over it, their bosses, mostly, are over it, the public is over it, the unions are over it, and I couldn't be more over it. But there's no end in sight.

The dispute over the Border Force officials' right-to-strike can tell you a lot how about how this whole thing has been handled from the start.

The Force, run by the Immigration Department, reckons that the stop-work actions at airports around the country is plunging us all into mortal danger, something about "national security".

But the Public Service Commission, the government's workplace authority, reckons the whole thing is a fizzer, only a few public servants are involved and the only hassle they are causing is to themselves.

So that's consistent. Not.

The strike was going nowhere anyway, I cleared customs and immigration on Friday morning in a personal best time.

Until the Immigration Department's bosses tried to put the boot in at Fair Work, going on about "national security" and guaranteeing more headlines and broadcast coverage, which the union lapped up gratefully.

This fight is a policy hangover from the Abbott years; the hardline public service bargaining policy, aimed at transforming workplace conditions in the 150,000-strong federal bureaucracy, making it a bit more like the private sector.

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash likes to call it "the real world".

The bargaining policy is a lot like John Howard's ill-fated WorkChoices, but the most striking similarity is its insistence on trying to do too much, too soon.

Tony Abbott and his then Employment Minister Eric Abetz, who cooked up the policy soon after winning the 2013 election, wanted big changes to the workplace landscape in the Australian Public Service and they wanted them now.

After anti-union hardliner John Lloyd was hired as Public Service Commissioner, in a hurry and with little or no process, the policy was drafted quickly with little input from anybody else and declared non-negotiable. Classic Abbott.

But unlike other policy dogs conceived by the man from Warringah like GP co-payments, or knights and dames, this bargaining policy has not been put out of its misery, despite proving unworkable.

It unlikely that Malcolm Turnbull feels he has much room to manoeuvre now, already under pressure from his party's right, anything that might be remotely conceived as bowing to union pressure would hand ammunition to the Prime Minister's internal critics.

So it looks like nobody is going anywhere for a while with something like 120,000 of the 150,000 federal public servants still refusing to play ball.

But it didn't have to be that way.

If Abbott and Abetz were so concerned that public servants had had it too good for too long, here is what they might have done.

Sit down with their departmental bosses, maybe get some of the rank-and-file together in a few focus groups and even, gasp, have a chat with unions.

The government could have outlined what it saw as the problems, sketched its vision for change and worked out what it would take to achieve it.

Then, armed with an accurate picture of where it would meet most resistance, a long-term plan, one with some prospect of success, could have been hatched and pursued over two to three bargaining cycles.

That's what people do in the "real world", they negotiate outcomes based on realistic appraisals of what's practical.

But that wasn't Abbott's style. The ideological bull-in-a-china shop approach was preferred, as usual, and two years later here we are.

The government has tried at various times to blame the main public service union, the CPSU, for the whole mess and then dismissed it as an irrelevant outfit that doesn't have many members and can't even organise a decent-sized strike.

But the policy guarantees confrontation because it guts the union's ability to maintain a presence in workplaces, leaving the CPSU no choice but to scrap tooth and nail. It's battling not only for its members' but for its long-term survival, not that it's going to admit to that.

Another thing they have in the "real world" is accountability. In the "real world", heads would roll, as Abbott might say, if what should be a routine industrial negotiation had disrupted a business for two years.

I can't think of anywhere in the "real world" this mess would be tolerated, because in the real world, people realise that ideologues always cause more problems than they solve.

Someone needs to show some "agility", sit down, have a conversation, and figure out what it's going to take to settle this thing.

Seriously.