Thoughts on entering a courthouse for a Letter of Testamentary:
-Courthouses are (naturally) designed to cower and intimidate. There's a lot of marble. And massive doors. And oak. But mostly marble. Marble walls. Marble tables. Marble statues. Doric columns. Or are they Ionic columns? In any event, they're iconic columns, and they intimidate.
-The police officers at the entrance with the metal detectors--THANK YOU for your service!!--do a remarkable job at staying alert. Think about it. Hundreds of people come into the courthouse every day, 99.999% intending to behave like law-abiding citizens. One in many thousands has bad intentions.
And they have to remain ready for that. Remain on high alert at all times. Remarkable.
-The difference between the speed at which a government employee and a business person accomplish a task requires scientific notation to even calculate.
-Bureaucrats still love paper. I mean they really REALLY love paper. "Bureaucrat," "Paper" and "Arouse" are three words that go together well. You can actually feel the sexual heat when a bureaucrat goes to shuffle paper, or retrieve it from its carefully catalogued repository.
-A couple with two kids came in for a marriage license. No one bats an eye anymore at the reversal of steps here, that would have been scandalous when I was young, and positively unthinkable a generation before that.
-My bureaucrat was super quirky. There's apparently nothing to stop a civil servant bureaucrat from being super quirky, as I'd imagine it would be difficult to fire them.
And you know what? I'm glad she was quirky.
She compensated for all that bloody marble.
Rick, lovely accounting of the bafflements of modern society. This had a nice Kafkaesque take, though with sharper humor. Here's to the quirks!
Posted by: Tom Bentley | July 06, 2014 at 06:48 PM