BUREAUCRACY BOUND (IN THE PAPERLESS OFFICE)

06-11-2007

Once upon a time, office workers were offered the dream of a paperless office. It's still no nearer muses Brendan Hawthorne, who's come across this confidential letter sent to staff at one of the country's top companies.

Following your recent request regarding information on paper recycling the management would request that the request you have made be made on the appropriate request form.

The request forms are clearly identifiable by their request tag or number. For us to deal with your request in the appropriate manner we would request that the request you have made be made on the appropriate request form for us to act upon once you have requested it.

If for some reason your request is received on an inappropriate request form we may have to request you to request a request form that is more appropriate on which to request your request to be requested upon.

To help guide you through the request process we include the 30-page full colour booklet 'Requests Made Easy'. However, for your convenience we include a short guide to making requests below entitled 'The Short Guide to Making Requests'.

Request Form 100095 is for requests requiring immediate attention and will take 28 days for your request to become Stage One processed. That is for us to reply to your request requesting that we have more time or more information in dealing with your initial request.

Request Form 100095A is only appropriate if your request does not require a formal response. This form is an information-sharing request form only and we request that you treat it that way.

Request Form 100095B is appropriate for requests requesting information on our services where we may request that your request is shared with appropriate partners requesting information on our clients requests.

Request Form 100095C is a straightforward request for information on the request services we offer.

As you can see in your specific case you will need to request Request Form 100095C on which you can request your request to be dealt with.

However, a quadruplet copy form is available should you be in doubt as to which request form is most appropriate though we may request that you withdraw the three incorrect request forms as a matter of courtesy.

You may wish to request a time by which your request is dealt with by our Request Team. If this request deadline is not met you may also wish to request a request complaints form – Requests Complaints Form 100095D - to request that our Request Complaints Team investigate your initial request. You may also wish to request a Request Complaints Manager to contact you.

This will need to be requested via our Management Request Complaints Form 100095E, requesting times and dates on which we may contact you. At this stage you may wish to request a Request Complaints Inquiry. This will need to be arranged via our Request Complaint Inquiry Form 100095F.

There is also a downloadable print request version of all our request forms, though we request that you send the printed request form via standard mail as our current computer system is incompatible with all request form formats and therefore cannot process all request form formats due to a recent change in corporate logo.

We request your patience and hope that we can deal efficiently with your request. Be assured that our commitment to our clients' requests is of a high priority though we may from time to time have a backlog of requests requesting request forms.

Yours sincerely,

The Requesting Requests Team

(Copyright 2007 Brendan Hawthorne)