Colourblind

"Don't try to understand bureaucratic logic. Trust me, you don't want to," said my wise friend Marcus Licinius Crassus. He told me the following story.

A steel company in a small central-eastern state in my country, once wished to set up mining operations there. They penned a letter and sent it to the Department of Administrative Affairs to seek the required permissions. The Department flipped the moment they received the letter. Reason? It was in green ink.

"Oh no, our department correspondence and work is carried out only in red and black ink," said they, and so the forwarded the application for a second opinion to the Ministry of Interior Affairs. And those guys flipped out too. Reason? "Green ink is used only by the top guys in the military."

So they forwarded the application to the Ministry of Defence. And again, those guys flipped out! Reason? "This is nothing to do with us or our department! It must go back where it came from!"

And so the application found it's way back, over the course of eight months, back to the Ministry of Interior Affairs, which sent it back to the Department of Administrative Affairs, which sent it back to the steel company, stating that the application needed to be in line with the law passed two months back, stating that all applications and forms must henceforth always be penned in blue or black ink.

I don't know about the steel company, but Reynolds, Add and Cello must have made a fortune in blue and black ink since then.

Warning: True story. Oops, you already read it. :D