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Originally Posted by lmp
A few years ago I toured the American Revolution Barracks in Trenton, New Jersey, where a heck of a history buff of a tour guide revealed that Official Documents, such as orders from a military superior, were placed in envelopes, then wrapped with red tape to distinguish them from other missives. So a humble army officer had to 'cut the red tape' in order to read the important official missive. I suppose the same practice was used across the sea.
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Nowadays we have no actual red tape (the stationery budget will not stretch to this, though it sounds quite pretty and reminiscent of a bygone era
) but we do have the ominous and intangible 'red box'. This is a yawning virtual receptacle, much like the Void, which must be filled, via e-mail, with papers for the weekend; said papers always seem to be requested at 2pm on a Friday afternoon. To Mordor with the Red Box!
How to be a civil servant may not sound like an exciting read (understatement of the year), but it explains everything in all its behemothic glory, and has a particularly nice (and extremely accurate) humour section about jargon and corporate English.
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Originally Posted by tgwbs
I know politicians have already been sent to Mordor (by myself, nonetheless! [or should that be me?]) but I really must send in particular the much-overused Tory phrase "cutting red tape." What exactly does red tape mean? Free transport services for the elderly? Free milk for schoolchildren? The NHS?!
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I second that this ought to go to Mordor. What this actually means is that all junior staff who do the leg work (i.e. answering your queries and processing your forms) get brigaded into agencies which are then privatised - it appears that numbers have been cut back drastically, but who is paying the newly privatised agencies for the work? Hmmm, it does not take a genius to work that one out (which is possibly a good thing considering my post yesterday
). Sadly, costs are then cut by paying already low paid staff even less, and there is less control over quality and service.
Outsourcing belongs in Mordor.