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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.