The Bureau of Minor Inconveniences by Pawan Bhatia is a comic fantasy novel about the end of the world, defeated entirely through bureaucracy.

The Bureau occupies a sub-basement of the municipal complex, two floors below Sanitation. Its staff: Marta Kellen (Senior Coordinator of Trivial Affairs), an intern named Dev, and Sir Gerald, a cat serving as Head of Bureau at salary grade HB-6. The Bureau officially does not exist.

The apocalypse arrives as Form 88-C, misrouted to the Bureau's incoming tray. Azgorath, Demon Lord of the Third Descent, has waited nine hundred years for written confirmation before commencing the ending of all things. Marta answers the phone and begins processing him line by line.

What follows is a season of Tuesdays: blood rain filed as weather, locusts relocated to the Department of End of the World Affairs' roof garden, darkness classified as a lighting deficiency. Dev asks the locust swarm for a permit. Sir Gerald breaks six years of silence to demand two million dollars in back pay, forcing a municipal audit that exposes the Department of End of the World Affairs as a waiting room that never prevented anything.

Marta discovers the truth: the entire municipal complex is a binding, an anti-apocalypse built by the city's founders disguised as bureaucracy. The squeaky bench, the tilted lean, the sub-basement office nobody can find a reason to close—all load-bearing. The founders' charter: "Let a Bureau be established for the minor inconveniences of this city, that the great door be kept by small things, and that the keeping of it be beneath notice."

The solution is Subsection Æ-Null, a routing code that goes nowhere, delivering nothing, holding everything forever. Azgorath signs Form 88-A voluntarily, entering the drawer as a petitioner, not a prisoner. The apocalypse becomes a perpetually pending case. Authorization: denied, with thanks.

The novel ends nine months later with a missing traffic cone—an omen unaccounted for—and a new voice on the phone: "I am calling to inquire about my cone."