All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Wonderful strange stories from around the world

Unplugged and Unstamped

It is a fact that humanity lies in the archives of bureaucracy. The fact that we are all being logged-in and stored in a tiny chip is simply a change of style, not intent.

Yet behind the bleeps and digits, and the bells and gongs, there lurks the civil servant in whom, somewhere, there lies the remnants of a human being. We have all met one – but only when we needed to. It is the man behind the desk, the relic of a cleric, the faceless bureaucrat who is professionally indifferent to change.

I was returning an application form that was so long it made the Old Testament look like a haiku poem-and I was already depressed in anticipation of failure when I walked into the room made no attempt to rise from his chair, but with an ingenious movement of his hands, gave the impression that he was sitting down after already having done so. It was quite brilliant.

The clerk behind this desk was a man of signatures and forms, and flow charts and flip charts-in duplicate, triplicate, and even quadruplicate. A man of rubber stamps for approval, disapproval, and referral. He took my passports to examine it, prod it, question it, doubt it, and – I sincerely hoped – make very close friends with it.

When he walked to a filing cabinet, I noticed his legs were of unequal length. He appeared to be going downhill and uphill at the same time, and, at one point, even sliding to the side.

With an irredeemable haircut, he was overdressed in position but said nothing about the man inside at all. Bunches of medals but no scent of battle. All hat and no rabbit. There was no feature on his face that you could you rest your eyes on for reference. It screamed bland, and lacked emotional weight.

His furious stamping and leafing were the only signature of his personality.

He seemed enmeshed in a hundred forgotten policy documents of vital importance.

He was also a man who could turn a straight question into an insistent answer. “England,” he said, as he slowly turned the stained pages of my passport.

“Yes, England.”

“You here.”

“I know,” I said quietly. It sounded more like an admittance of guilt, rather than a simple and obvious statement of fact.

“What your work?”

“I shout at foreigners.”

“Why?”

“To learn them to speak English as she is spoke.”

He looked at my application and began to slowly then very slowly unsheaved a leaf from a ream of paper as his profession required-being famously obsessed with time to the detriment of motion.

“White this way. Now.”

When it came to the military service question I wrote, “Exempt.” The next question was, “Reason for exemption?” This was tricky. I was tempted to write, “Because we won,” but quickly saw the foolishness of this imperial arrogance and simply wrote, “Still trying.” I handed him the form, at which point his unusually large hand short out from his light sleeves, hotly pursued by enormous cuffs to receive it. He surveyed the form as if it was a map of Iraq.

“Why you want stay here?”

“To retire.”

“You too young.”

“As a student?”

“You too old.”

This was not going well. Not only had I turned up in the wrong language, I had turned up at the wrong age as well.

I was considering euthanasia when the phone on this desk rang.

He let it ring four times so the person at the other and would be delighted that someone was there. “B*****d,” I muttered.

He spoke into the phone, and suddenly his face had character. It portrayed the look of a man who’d only just Hookers Club the previous evening. Suddenly I felt much better.

Then a really extraordinary thing happened; he blushed.

Civil servants don’t blush. And gorillas don’t purr.

He came back to the desk, whipped out some paper, jammed it into his typewriter, and pecked furiously at the keys. Someone, something, somewhere had made him angry – and I knew then that I was doomed. I knew my entity was gone, and I was about to become an unwanted comma in an unknown file.

He ripped out the paper, clipped, it, stamped it, punched it, and then tore it up.

“I solly. Bring your bassboot back tomorrow,” he said with cold apology.

Then he turned this back on me and hobbled to the left towards his filling cabinet which was over on the right. And I walked straight out of the door.

Remember. Nothing of value comes overnight.

By Roger Beaumont

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