Re: what to buy now?

Warning. Completely OT. :-)

Paul van Delst <Paul.vanDelst@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Gordon Sande wrote:
On 2007-02-22 11:57:03 -0400, Paul van Delst <Paul.vanDelst@xxxxxxxx> said:
Gordon Sande wrote:
But then there are lots of environments
where the paperwork is the major hurdle.
There are places where it's *not*? :o)
What does .gov stand for in your email address?
I can email you a form to fill out and submit so you can obtain that
information.

You can email him that form without first getting approvals? Things have
improved. :-)

Once upon a time, quite a while ago actually, I got a request from
someone in the "Republic of China" (aka Taiwan) for a copy of one of my
papers. It was a publically published paper, which we freely mailed out
to anyone who asked. Asking the author to (snail)mail one was a common
way for people to get copies of papers in those days.

Our mail room bounced the outgoing mail because he didn't know the
difference between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of
China. (The mail room clerk was not exactly a model of worldly
knowledge.) We couldn't send things to the People's Republic of China. I
think it was just covering for his mistake that it was pointed out that
we weren't supposed to send anything at all outside of the center
without approval; that rule applied even to domestic mail. The rule is
usually "interpreted" out of existance by claiming that it applies only
to "official correspondence", which nothing that we do ever counts as.
But now that the issue was raised, it was going to be applied to that
one piece of mail.

Ok. I asked how to get approval. Turns out that nobody at our site knew
the procedure to do that or was willing to research it. (The answer
tended to be "probably somewhere at headquarters"). I gave up and said
that I'd just write a 2-line apology that I could not send the requested
paper. Nope, I wasn't allowed to send even that without approval, which
we didn't have a way to do. What I was supposed to do was just pretend
that I'd never seen the request. That exceeds the bounds of what I
consider acceptable professional behavior.

I "gave up" and mailed a copy of the paper from home. :-)

--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
.

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