Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate.
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
I had a bureaucrat tell me to leave my document with him so it can be processed and come back next Monday, and when I told him that I couldn't as I was leaving the country, he gave me a weird look, took the document, stamped it and gave it back to me - "done !".
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan This reminds me of the Twelve Tasks of Asterix. One scene was pretty much this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tasks_of_Asterix -
Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
Literally they named the language (in English) after the process.
Mandarin is such an art it gets a language.
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan Just two windows? Try to enter/leave Turkmenistan when traveling on a motorcycle. And that with your visa already granted.
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Back in the 1980s, some Italian cafes employed a similar system. As a customer, you'd place your order at one window, and the clerk would give you a receipt/voucher. You'd then step to a second window, and hand over the slip of paper before stepping to a third window where you'd collect your coffee. I recall, though these are hazy old memories, at least one morning where it was the same person at each of the three windows.
Also, I once did the same PRC consulate dance in SF!
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@dan This reminds me of the Twelve Tasks of Asterix. One scene was pretty much this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Tasks_of_Asterix@annehargreaves @dan And here I was thinking that was an exaggeration.
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The Brits take the greatest pride in their bureaucracy -- though the French, Russians, and Byzantine Greeks were tough competitors -- but the Chinese invented it.
@huntingdon @dan The Babylonians and Egyptians dispute who invented Bureacracy
you should have seen the forms required, during construction of the great Pyramid of Cheops, if a stone was delivered to the site and the stone was not in spec
page after page of papyrus
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Back in the 1980s, some Italian cafes employed a similar system. As a customer, you'd place your order at one window, and the clerk would give you a receipt/voucher. You'd then step to a second window, and hand over the slip of paper before stepping to a third window where you'd collect your coffee. I recall, though these are hazy old memories, at least one morning where it was the same person at each of the three windows.
Also, I once did the same PRC consulate dance in SF!
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan this is exactly how hyperthreading in CPUs work
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
I’d love her to watch Terry Gilliams Brazil… She’d probably assume it was a documentary…
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Some years ago, I needed to get an visa for urgent travel to China, a process that required me to fly down to SF and stand in a very long line at the Chinese consulate. When I finally handed the woman there my forms, she promptly stamped them and said "you need to take these to Window 2", pointing around the corner. So I walked around the corner...
...where *the same woman* swiveled her chair around and proceeded to check the stamp that she had just applied.
I would have been annoyed if I wasn't in so much awe at discovering the purest form of bureaucracy.
@dan I've written up notes for a D&D campaign in a surreal city, and one of the locations is a pair of buildings named the Tenements of Faith and the Tenements of State.
The one is inhabited by bickering priests of innumerable minor gods, the other by low-level bureaucrats.
I'll be stealing this for the latter.
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@dan I've written up notes for a D&D campaign in a surreal city, and one of the locations is a pair of buildings named the Tenements of Faith and the Tenements of State.
The one is inhabited by bickering priests of innumerable minor gods, the other by low-level bureaucrats.
I'll be stealing this for the latter.
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@peter_b @dan When I was in college I had to obtain some papers and I did have to do a round of about five or so desks and queues only to end up at the first one.
The person there got snippy at me for being annoyed, to which I replied that if I'd had to circle four queues to end up at the beginning maybe I wasn't the one in the wrong.
I think. It's been a few decades. But we can do this in Argentina, too. We have the technology.
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