If you write a letter of complaint or ask questions by handwritten letter, the recipient is duty bound to answer. Really good way to keep "The Hired Help" aka Politicians and Bureaucrats on their toes. -- Knitnan
Dear Employee, wrote Carval Seng. Letters that started like this were never a good sign for the recipient.
Seng wrote carefully and distinctly about the lack of maintenance between elections, of how people in hir district would like to see the orange of maintenance uniforms a little more regularly than once every four years. Ze wrote of how the public amenities were poorly maintained, poorly funded, and how private amenities hardly needed honest taxpayers' money.
Ze went on to detail that those who paid for their advertising would not be the crucial vote, come next election, and citizens like Seng were more important than those with gross amounts of money. In fact, taxes should be lesser for those who had the least, and greater for those who had the most. It was not, after all, possible to squeeze blood out of a stone.
All this, Seng wrote in the best calligraphy ze could master. A work of art from a poison pen. Dipped in the most vitriolic sarcasm that Seng knew.
And once the five-page masterpiece was done, it was signed and sealed and sent off to Seng's chosen representative. Seng congratulated hirself on a wake-up call well done.
*
In the offices of power, Secretary #827 opened a letter and moaned. Another hand-written one! What a pain! He forwarded it down the Unreadable pipe and thought nothing more of it.
In the Undreadables Department, Secretary #1153 scanned the document and ran it through every font recognition program the offices had. Once no luck was achieved there, it went further down the chain to people who could actually read the hand-made writing and decipher it into text.
In the Deciphering Department, Secretary #6824 dutifully transcribed the words into a document without understanding their overall content and forwarded it back to Unreadables.
Once there, Secretary #1826 skimmed it for relevant content and applied such to the standard form. Then they readied a copy of the "Thank you for your interest" letter, addressed to Carval Seng, and directing hir to please submit all concerns via the online form. It was stamped with the representative's signature and sent along its way.
The representative never saw Carval Seng's words. If they had, they might have woken up. Sadly, the multiple layers of bureaucracy exist to protect the ivory tower set from ever opening their eyes.
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