Dennis Prager on Bureaucracy (9/1/09) and a Personal Anecdote from Former USSR

Vocal Minority ^ | 9/2/09 | EricTheRed_VocalMinority

[EricTheRed_VocalMinority]

Even as late as 1999, if you needed someone’s phone number or address, there were no White Pages or Yellow Pages like in the West. Instead, you had to visit these government-run information services sprinkled throughout the country. Upon receiving the requested information, which might not even be accurate or up-to-date, you paid a fee of about 15 cents per piece of information. Like most government-run services, they are open certain times of the day, and on some days not at all.

When I and the friend with whom I was traveling arrived at one of these info service centers in Moscow, we found two women sitting behind the counter, doing absolutely nothing. When my friend told them the name of the Muscovite friend she wanted to look up, one of them informed us they were closed and couldn’t look up the information. But she and a coworker were sitting right there, with the phone books containing the needed information sitting on the shelves right behind them! It made no difference; the woman repeated that they were currently closed. When we asked when they would be reopening, the woman responded with a completely straight emotionless face: “Maybe two weeks, maybe four weeks, maybe never.” Exasperated, we finally asked where the nearest open info center was. The woman, clearly annoyed by having to move her rear end, extracted a big book and turned to a page therein. She wrote down an address on a slip of paper, handed it to us … and then charged us 15 cents for that information!

I was reminded of this story when reading the latest piece by Dennis Prager about how bureaucracy turns people into unthinking automatons. People living and/or

[VOA]

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