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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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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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 sounds like a pink panther movie.
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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 impressive. but. both of your checks were on the same day in the same building. this would be an efficient day of progress on any application, review, or question regarding disability or welfare benefits.like this is douglas adams and welfare/disability is kafka
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@rk this scene would translate well to an Infocom game
@dan @rk isn't that more or less what Papers, Please is about? https://papersplea.se/
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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.
@adriano @peter_b @dan similar to my experience immigrating to Portugal. There are all sorts of places where you can get in a dependency loop of 3 or more government entities all of which insist one of the others approve a document before they can do anything. Mostly a function of AIMA (the immigration bureaucracy) being very underfunded for the load placed on it. But also, the PT bureaucracy seems to give a lot of wiggle room for untrained employees to make stuff up or ignore published rules.
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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 nearly 30 years ago I visited one of the smaller Caribbean islands… 4 seater plane and they had to shoo goats off the runway before we landed. On arrival, a friendly chap in a smart uniform and hat at passport control inspected our passports and then directed us to customs control. He walked with us to this other desk, stuck on a slightly different hat and asked us if we had anything to declare!
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