Welcome Back, Friends...
In last week's Funnies, we started our look at bureaucracy
and bureaucrats. A few of you have asked why the title was
"Power Failures?" Maybe it's a little obscure, but it's because
bureaucracy implies power, and bureaucracy is at its funniest
when the bureaucrats in power have failed to stay in touch with
the real world.
This happens - or so it seems - pretty commonly. And with
an estimated 85,000 different levels of government just in the
U.S. alone, it's no wonder that this reign of error is pretty
commonplace. Some mistakes are so incredibly silly it s a wonder
that anyone could miss them - but miss them they do. Like the
time U.S. Government computers declared that everyone in
Hartford, Connecticut was dead.
Thanks this week to our friends and contributors: Jerry
Taff, Eva Yuhwa Lu, Timothy McChain, Caterina Sukup, Beth Butler,
Kerry Miller, Dale Frederickson, Laura Hong Li, Ralph Conrad,
Sylvia Libin He, Sue Yan, Peter Adler, Sachiko Sumida, Lydia
Cheong Chu-Ling, Carol Becwar, Emily Kling and Yukari Kawabata.
Thanks for all of your many and varied contributions! Hope all
of you had a nice Thanksgiving and a nice start to the shopping
season.
Have A Great Week!
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CHANGE OF ADDRESS NOTICE...
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Two street names in Grantham, New Hampshire caused endless
confusion because they were too similar. After years of mis-
directed letters and lost visitors, the residents of Stoney Brook
Drive and Stoney Brook Lane petitioned the town council for a
name change. After much debate, the council settled on new names
for the two streets - not that they were much help. The new
names are Old Springs Drive and Old Springs Lane, respectively.
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WHY ARE THEY DISGRUNTLED? STUFF LIKE THIS...
------------------------------------------
Martha Cherry, a mail carrier from White Plains, New York
with over 18 years of service, was dismissed from her route
recently because her stride is too short.
"At each step, the heel of your leading foot did not pass
the toe of the trailing foot by more than one inch. As a result,
you required 13 minutes longer than your demonstrated ability to
deliver mail to this section of your route," stated the Postal
Service report that led to her dismissal.
Postal customers along her route disagreed, saying that the
49-year-old mail carrier always gave them excellent service,
whether she walks fast or not. "If walking quickly is more
important than kind, sensitive service to customers, then
something is seriously amiss with the post office's priorities,"
according to a letter signed by over forty residents. (AP)
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ROAD SCULPTURE?
--------------
If you often travel along U.S. highway 68 near Wilmore,
Kentucky, you noticed a change recently. The stripped and
rusted-out hulk of a 1974 Dodge Dart that had been sitting along
that road was finally towed away. The State of Kentucky and
Jasamine County had been arguing over whose responsibility it was
to remove the wreck since it was abandoned there - in 1988.
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IN THE BAG...
----------
In what has to be a unique move, the Health Ministry of
Turkey issued a regulation that all vehicles, cafes, homes,
cinemas and most work places be equipped with standard-issue body
bags.
People would have been required to buy the $10 body bags and
take them along on their daily activities, in case of death.
The official newspaper, "Sabah," described the move as a
"world first," stating that, "The worry that 'my body will be
left in the street' will be eliminated."
An outcry from the press and opposition politicians stopped
the government from carrying out the plans.
"It was a ridiculous decision. We halted it," Health
Minister Ibrahim Ozsoy was quoted as saying. (Reuters)
[ The only really surprising thing is that
the regulations didn't require people to zip
themselves in before dying... ]
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RULE OF DEFACTUALIZATION: Information deteriorates as
it moves upward through a bureaucracy.
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DIGITAL DILEMMA
---------------
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service does not
have a great reputation as a well-run government department.
Next to them, the tax folks are a bunch of sweethearts who go out
of their way to make things nice for their clients. The INS is
understaffed and overworked, used to dealing with people who have
no political clout, and can't vote, and they have a terrible
tendency to lose things. People slip through the cracks when
this department messes up, and even qualified legal immigrants
can't get anywhere with them.
A recent lawsuit pointed out just how stupid this can get.
Lorenzo Ubierna, a former political prisoner of Cuba who escaped
to the U.S., has every qualification for citizenship except one.
He cannot produce a full set of fingerprints as required.
Ubierna has been in a bureaucratic limbo for over 21 months
because he only has six fingers, having lost the other four in an
accident years before. In the nine different times he's
submitted fingerprint cards, he's included letters from his
doctor and photographs of his hands, all to no avail. Those four
empty spots result in the record being sent back as incomplete.
The class action lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in
Miami, claims that the INS has not even followed its own
regulations, which require the government to tell applicants
whether they will be granted citizenship or not within 120 days.
Even the INS admits it has a 200,000-case backlog that often
results in delays of two years or more.
"I think this is a great country, but the bureaucracy ...,"
said Ubierna, waving his fingerprint forms. (Reuters)
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ONE MAN'S TRASH...
---------------
Due to budget cuts, the city of Washington, D.C. had
suspended pickup of "bulk trash" - things like sofas and
appliances - for the past few years.
But the financial situation has improved somewhat in recent
months, so the city decided to resume picking up such items. In
order to advertise this, the city paid to truck in a few thousand
pounds of junk to give the ads the proper look. Even though many
Washington D.C. residents had a huge backlog of such junk they
would have contributed for free. (Washington Business Journal)
-----
During the height of Washington D.C.'s financial problems,
businessmen paying their quarterly corporate taxes were surprised
to find their tax payments returned unopened. The city lost
millions of dollars in interest because they had failed to pay
the $405 rental on the Post Office box used to collect the money.
When the post office closed the box, all mail was returned to
sender.
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SPECIOUS SPECIES...
----------------
Last January, the National Wilderness Institute charged that
the U.S. Department of the Interior has mismanaged the listing of
endangered plants. In particular, they charged that several of
the species being protected, such as the "Maguire Daisy," do not
exist. The government claims that it costs over $37,000 to
remove a name from the list, even though they have continued to
add hundreds of new species to the protected list.
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PAPERING OVER SOME PROBLEMS...
---------------------------
The State Legislature in Missouri approved a bill to reduce
and simplify state paperwork - a bill that ran on for over a
thousands pages and weighed five pounds (2 KG) as finally
printed.
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IN DUTCH WITH THE E.U.
---------------------
The new European Union is just starting out, but they've
already been hard at work building up a bureaucracy to rival any
in the world. After months of lobbying and debate, they have
decided that the traditional Dutch wooden shoes are safe and
practical, and would be acceptable in the workplace - something
pretty well accepted in the Netherlands for the past 600 years.
Scientific tests have now determined that the traditional wooden
clogs are actually superior to modern safety shoes in many
applications.
-----
Does somebody in the E.U. have a shoe fetish? The new
European Union owner's manual that must be included with all
shoes is over 24 pages long. It goes on and on about sizes,
safety, how to chose the correct shoes and how to read the E.U.
boot comfort ratings. Always helpful, it advises that, "Each
boot should be tried for fitting before use."
I suppose that also applies to other products, although the
E.U. has set incredibly complicated standards for thousands of
common items. From now on, condoms sold in any E.U. country must
be at least 6.8 inches (17.2 CM) and from 1.76 to 2.24 inches
(4.5 to 5.7 CM) wide. And no, I don't want to know how they
arrived at those numbers... (Reuters/AP)
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HAVE YOUR OWN BUREAUCRAT...
------------------------
In most places here in the U.S., spending cutbacks have led
to fewer workers and longer lines for government services. But
not, apparently, in Clark County, Nevada. In that county,
thirteen Department of Agriculture employees from three different
agencies work to assist farmers.
Not exactly the heart of the farm belt, the entire county
only has forty farmers.
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THE MOSHINSKY MANEUVER
----------------------
What we really need are methods for neutralizing
bureaucracies when they get in the way. Silly rules and
regulations have a way of strangling the most progressive and
forward thinking people. Sometimes, the best way of dealing with
bureaucrats is to give them everything they ask for. And maybe
little bit more.
At Mexico's National Institute of Nuclear Research, a new
administrator, who was not a scientist, tried to put the science
departments on a proper, industrial basis. Among many other
regulations, he announced that he would require that every
department head would have to file a weekly "Activities Report,"
as well as a report on "Projected Activities for the Coming
Week." Both of these were to be delivered in a weekly department
head meeting with the director.
Needless to say, the scientists hated this ridiculous
nonsense.
The one who found the way out was the head of the
Theoretical Physics Department, a bright fellow named Dr. Marcos
Moshinsky.
At the first of the required meetings, he presented the new
director with a weekly report that consisted of two hand-written
pages of the most complex equations the Theoretical Physics
Department had solved that week.
"And, during the coming week, the Theoretical Physics
Department hopes to solve the following," he announced,
presenting another three pages of extremely complex equations.
Rather than admit he couldn't understand any of this, the
Head of the Institute announced a short time later that the
Theoretical Physics Department was excused from the weekly
meetings, and could present only one report every six months.
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IN THE BEGINNING...
----------------
It's common practice to trace the ownership of a piece of
property when it is sold, just so you can be sure that you can
prove ownership. But the government sometimes carries this to
extremes.
Take the case of a New Orleans lawyer who sought an FHA
(Federal Housing Administration) loan for a client. He was told
that the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory
title to a parcel of property being offered as collateral.
The original title to the property dated back to 1803, which
took the lawyer three months to track down. After sending the
information to FHA, he received the following reply:
"Upon review of your letter adjoining your
client's loan application, we note that the request is
supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment
the able manner in which you prepared and presented the
application, we must point out that you have only
cleared the Title to the proposed collateral property
back to the year 1803. Before final approval can be
accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back
to its origin."
The lawyer responded:
"Your letter regarding Titles in Case No. 189156
has been received. I note that you wish to have Titles
extended further than the 194 years covered by the
present application.
I was unaware that any educated person in this
country, particularly those working in the property
arena, would not know that Louisiana was purchased by
the U.S. from France in 1803, the year of origin
identified in our application.
For the edification of uninformed FHA bureaucrats,
the title to the land prior to U.S. ownership was
obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of
Conquest from Spain.
The land came into possession of Spain by Right of
Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named
Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the
privilege of seeking a new route to India by the then
reigning monarch, Isabella.
The good queen, being a pious woman and careful
about titles, almost as much as the FHA, took the
precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before
she sold her jewels to fund Columbus' expedition.
Now the Pope, as I'm sure you know, is the
emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And God, it
is commonly accepted, created this world. Therefore, I
believe it is safe to presume that He also made that
part of the world called Louisiana."
[ Now, what about that disputed claim by the
Indians? ]
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© 1998 by Bill Becwar. All Rights Reserved.
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