Rudie can´t fail

I just assigned my students' final grades. It's not over yet: There's a meeting next week where the professors talk about the grades (why?), and then there's the awful day of student complaints and requests for regrades. But the grades have more or less been determined. And I failed people. I've never failed anyone before. When I was teaching in the US I tried to be part of the solution, rather than the problem, of grade inflation. But I tried in the form of giving people C's, not failing them. Failing people is a lot of work. They're gonna complain and make your life unpleasant, and in US universities there's often a lot more paperwork required to fail someone. (Am I giving away too much dirt about higher education in the US?) Here apparently it's much more common to fail people, which hopefully means it will be less of a pain in the ass to fail people. Some of my students were repeating the class for the second or even the third time, so maybe they're used to it by now? I know I shouldn't, but I feel bad failing them. Sympathy isn't one of my more prominent personality traits; why is it rearing its ugly head now?