Ground Control to Major Tom

It's only paperwork

Time for another long-awaited post. Like many elderly men, once a month is about the best I can manage. My brain doesn't work very well these days, not when it has to deal with mountains of paperwork on a daily basis. Which reminds me. I was getting agitated trying to sort out a set of inconsistent documents (modern paper systems have their own internal logic that would confound even Kurt Godel) on behalf of someone, when Mr Said Person coolly sauntered into the room and said, "Relax lah, it's only paperwork." For a brief moment, I felt like stuffing the papers into his mouth. That very evening, he tried the same words on someone who didn't like him very much to begin with. The result was like National Day- a spectacular, not to mention colourful, fireworks display.

I was recounting the incident to a friend even later that day. He pointed out that people usually get into trouble because their papers aren't in order, rather than due to any deliberate malfeasance on their part; i.e. errors of omission not commission. In the bureaucratic society, black ink on white paper construct reality. It's a little difficult to prove that the actual situation really isn't the case when all the documents indicate otherwise. I am reminded of a short story in which a city's immense wealth ultimately derived from a minor accounting error many decades back. When the chief accountant destroyed the document containing the error, obviously none of the billions disappeared instantaneously. But should someone trace the origins of the wealth, he will find himself facing a dead end, a Big Bang singularity that no longer exists. Something does come out from nothing.

There is this trend of engaging in oblique metaphors going around in the office. For example, we have two guys calling each other 'Bear' and 'Rabbit' cos they share a bear-rabbit relationship. Not ecologically speaking, but according to this little story:

A bear and a rabbit are sitting on a log in the forest.
Suddenly, the bear looks at the rabbit and says,"Do you have a problem with shit sticking to your fur?"
The rabbit says,"No..."
So the bear wipes his ass with the rabbit.

Then there's this ongoing discussion about durians and apples that kinda originated from me. Some guy said he had trouble distinguishing between durians and apples. I told him durians are durians, apples are apples. They may have some similar qualities, but upon closer inspection the difference ought to be clear. One should trust one's eyes (and nose), not what the grocer says. He said that some durians smell like apples. I insisted that durians have essential duriankind qualities, so do apples. Any similarity in smell must be artificial. An optimistic person came along and suggested that durians and apples are both fruits and that we should look at the larger category rather than focus on differences. Another person said that durians and apples are so dissimilar that the metaphor isn't apt.

So I changed durians and apples to glasses of salty and sweet water. Even though the glass is labelled 'Sweet', my first taste of the liquid tells me it's salty. Never mind, I take another sip and again the water's salty. This time, regardless of what the label indicates, I think I have enough reason to believe that subsequent sips won't be any different. Maybe the sweet stuff is nearer the bottom, but I'm not gonna drink more than half a glass of salty water to get to it. My friend prefers to drink the whole thing, but I have a low tolerance for salt.

posted by KynTheMan @ 10:53 AM