11-007

I shall say this only once.

I once had the notion that I would join the civil service. They told me I would never have to work again, so the prospect was quite appealing.

There is, in the land of paper shuffling, a certain way of doing things. A sort of unwritten code book, and all who enter the service are required to assimilate or be sent to the front desk. I was soon in the swing of things, passing the buck, benchmarking, glitching and water-shedding with the best of them. I leant how to upsize my downsizing and accentuate my outcomes with aplomb, although aplomb was mostly out of the office.

Every day I was required to arrive, make coffee, have my lunch, and then go home. The psychologists painted our walls a ‘work enhancing’ colour, and the ergonomosists gave us lumber cushions for our achievable outcome. And let me tell you, my achievable outcomes felt the better for it, having just the week before, bent over backwards and hurt my under- appreciations. We were allowed ‘interaction breaks’ to be productive team players, although I mostly sat on the bench, (see benchmarking) and the air conditioning was set at a optimum focus level, but people with glasses had their own focus levels. My every care was whisked away by an allied professional, whose sole purpose, it seemed to me, was to make me happy.

My life was as full as my in-box, when, one day, after a group hug, I sauntered back to my desk and came up against, what we call ‘a curly one’. My team leader, a pillar of useless knowledge, said to ask someone on the upper floor. Never one to think for myself, I duly sent my ‘curly one’ up to a higher authority. In answer to my simple question, the higher authority decided to clarify things once, and for all.

Some emails can be classified as unclassified, and in the process of classifying an email as unclassified, the unclassified email has been classified. However, an email that has yet to be classified, is not technically unclassified or classified.
On the intranet for example, we have classifieds which are all unclassified. So when an unclassified classified is lodged, there is no need to reclassify the classification to unclassified, as advertisements currently do not require classification or unclassification.

I filed it under ‘C’, my job complete.