I've noticed that since 9-11, bureacracy has gone up by the power of 10. ID, important I know, is now an Olympic sport with hurdles and high jumps a-plenty. Here we are living in a paperless society, but somebody must be filing all that crap I just photocopied. Where is that paper mountain? Does anybody really read it? I watch Henry Louis Gates' amazingly entertaining show on PBS ('Finding Your Roots') and the availability of documents is impressive all over the world. Despite wars, someone always has some baptismal or birth/death/marriage records and that is great for our understanding of family tree. But the mounds of passport photocopies, visas, licences, utility bills and so on must be huge! What if there were a tsunami near that mound? Would it survive? Would history? How is Japan coping with the lack of history (not even the folk-spoken word version) following the earthquake and tsunami in the north.
But when you are trying to complete a simple process and are sent back time after time to dig for more
'evidence' of who you are, photocopied in triplicate, and you realise that you have now spent 3 days on something that should have taken an hour, it seems a ridiculous way to live. I can't wait till we all have some biometric id that replaces all this crap; I can put my family tree on there too and a digital copy would be fine. Just remember to keep upgrading to the new formats and save as a backup!!
No comments:
Post a Comment