Recycled Firelighters
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy had this to say about the Vogons:
They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders - signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
From my recent experiences over the past 452 (and counting) days attempting to seek payment for my writing work in the UK in the last week of 2021, I can now fully understand the inspiration for Douglas Adams' fictional alien race of bureaucrats. He had, after all, been a script editor for the other famous science fiction series produced there in the late 1970s, so he may have had first hand knowledge of what's required for the desanguination of granite.
Over the past months I have submitted and resubmitted the required invoices and documents requested, only to be told after the fact that there was some nitpicked thing wrong and I needed to do it again.
The last insult was that I hadn't included my banking information along with my invoices. In this email reply I received, I could plainly see it was indeed all there in the quoted text of my previous email this person was responding to.
I lost my shit.
Now I discover - although no-one told me at any time in the last year or so - that my banking information needed to be included within the page of the invoice itself. I've done this and resent it, again.
*Sigh*
Fine, then, go build your hyperspace bypass, see if I care.
ETA: I was paid in full, yesterday.
They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders - signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
From my recent experiences over the past 452 (and counting) days attempting to seek payment for my writing work in the UK in the last week of 2021, I can now fully understand the inspiration for Douglas Adams' fictional alien race of bureaucrats. He had, after all, been a script editor for the other famous science fiction series produced there in the late 1970s, so he may have had first hand knowledge of what's required for the desanguination of granite.
Over the past months I have submitted and resubmitted the required invoices and documents requested, only to be told after the fact that there was some nitpicked thing wrong and I needed to do it again.
The last insult was that I hadn't included my banking information along with my invoices. In this email reply I received, I could plainly see it was indeed all there in the quoted text of my previous email this person was responding to.
I lost my shit.
Now I discover - although no-one told me at any time in the last year or so - that my banking information needed to be included within the page of the invoice itself. I've done this and resent it, again.
*Sigh*
Fine, then, go build your hyperspace bypass, see if I care.
ETA: I was paid in full, yesterday.