Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site ucbcad.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!ucbcad!ucbesvax.turner From: ucbesvax.turner@ucbcad.UUCP Newsgroups: net.flame Subject: Generic Bureaucracy - (nf) Message-ID: <158@ucbcad.UUCP> Date: Wed, 3-Aug-83 22:08:59 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbcad.158 Posted: Wed Aug 3 22:08:59 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 4-Aug-83 11:13:01 EDT Sender: notes@ucbcad.UUCP Organization: UC Berkeley, CAD Group Lines: 32 #N:ucbesvax:2900013:000:1417 ucbesvax!turner Aug 3 16:13:00 1983 I just spent about two hours (with ma-a-any more to come, I'm sure) hassling with your generic personnel bureaucracy. Everything is done with signed notes, or face-to-face, with forms and slips and all that. Hard information is next to impossible to come by. I ran around, getting signatures, repeating, to each person I had to deal with, all the trivial details I was supposed to remember from my last encounter, and generally looking like a fool. And now, I sit down at a terminal, and communicate to hundreds of people throughout the country with a clean-but-flexible interface to a computer attached to a phone network. There is a technology gap of at least thirty years here, if you don't count recent improvements in copier machines and office phone systems. We're gonna put a lot of people out of work, but I've stopped caring. I'm sorry if your brother or cousin or nephew is a bureaucrat, that's just life in the big city. Eat flame, paper-shufflers of the world. Your next stop: peeling potatoes in the kitchen of an organic farm just outside Cotati, California--*if* you're lucky. More Neutron Flux from, Michael Turner ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner P.S. Actually, considering that the lower echelons of this stratum of society are peopled by underpaid, overworked women, the real impact will hit the least deserving. But, as I say, that's just LITBC, which has never been completely safe.