[ All credit to rodneyharrison1966, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“Mr. Constant,”
he said,
“right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears.
But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats
—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate,
and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them;
who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think,
who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks;
who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction,
who call meetings whenever they feel lonely,
who write memos whenever they feel unloved;
men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired.
A single industrial bureaucrat,
if he is sufficiently vital and nervous,
should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”
[ Kurt Vonnegut – The Sirens of Titan ]
Wonderful quotation and photograph and very clever combination!
Thank you Tricia 🙂 I liked the feel of it as well – ah well, won’t have to deal with them again until approx. september or decembre of this year – thank God for small favours 😉
I was totally reading the quote line for line, recognizing it and whammo, it’s Vonnegut. OMG I love {most of} what he writes! Great photo choice for it too!!
Thanks Hun! Totally agree: Vonnegut’s awesome (especially like what he said about George W. although he did receive a lot of heat over that)!
Hugs