Bureaucracy: It Is Written, So It Is

[The "Bureaucracy" correspondence begins on July 23rd. Begin there for context.]

Pierre Dolet writes:

We have, mais oui, the bureaucracy of my cousins in France:

It Is Written, So It Is.

Henri, my cousin, and his dear wife, Henriette, need to update their travel documents – they are French citizens resident in America. This is a regular occurrence (fortunately, not a frequent regular occurrence) and it necessitates the submission of new lifedata change information (if any), new fee payments (always and ever-growing) and new photographs (a sometime traumatic experience, especially for Henriette – Henri, fortunately. having achieved the visage of aged wisdom at the tender year of 24 and remained ever constant ever since).

Eh bien, they present themselves at the consulate, they complete the forms, they provide the pictures – and, several days later, they receive the documents.

Ah, the documents . . .

But – before we look at the documents, we should look at the consulate. This is not a busy consulate. There are no long lines, no masses of émigrés pushing at the doors for their life-saving visas. No real– (well, for lack of a better word) No real work to do. Except for these small, routine and infrequent tasks.

Simple tasks.

. . . documents the, Ah

Beautifully bound little Papers Official, these documents, a tribute to the standards of the professional diplomatic class manning French consulates worldwide.

Which is why, of course, Henri’s photograph is in Henriette’s documents – and vice-versa.

There has been, equally of course, an attempt to return the documents with the opening phrase “I am afraid that there has been a mistake” – but, that is not a phrase that can be heard, because it immediately encounters an upraised hand and the Phrase Official: “Procedure has been followed, there have been no mistakes.”

Missing from the Phrase Official was the Act Logical: to look at the documents.

This cannot be allowed.

This cannot be allowed.

For to allow this would be to admit that, throughout the seventeen-hundred-and-forty-five Officially Decreed Steps for processing this document, no one thought to look at what he or she was doing and to make note (let alone correct) the photographic mismatch. Henri/Henriette – so obviously clear that Henriette has a beard and moustache, that Henri has a feminine side expressive in his rouged and lipsticked visage.

The Steps Official have been followed, the document issued: It Is Written, So It Is.

Vive La France!

The Cube responds:

Do not be so harsh on your French brethren – The Cube was once listed as a “Malamute mix” in the local town census – a mistake repeated ad infinitum by direct mailers for ten years. Small town bureaucracy teamed with mass advertising business smarts: we American can match and surpass anything the French nation can conjure. As a side note: The Malamute mix was quite incensed that I had stolen her identity.