Now a lot of people think that governments, or legal types thrive in pointless red tape, and the rest of us mere mortals are driven insane with the pointlessness of their tasks.  The truth is somewhat different, Busby* could teach these lovers of the red tape a thing or two about Sisyphean tasks.

Allow me to give you an example,  So grab yourself a coffee, make yourself comfortable, “you Are?” Right, we’ll begin…

You may recall I was developing some software to integrate into the Busby Directory enquirers system, allowing My company to place entries in UK phone books. Well this system is now fully up and running and we are sending hundreds of details at them in an very intricate string of text.  I’ll give an example, this would be one line from a file containing several hundred entries per go :-

1Y 00049732100730039420556031 NY M20090216 Jo Blogs company LL27 3Y 08000830031 FAX S1 1 M EBF B [But with about 50 random spaces between the words]

Now I upload this file directly into the Busby Server, which then checks the data to make sure its all correct. Then as far as we can tell, Busby then prints out the datat on individual pages (One per number) and gives them to actual Humans to type into a form on a computer screen. (So from digital data, to printed data, to digital data).

Occasional the person at Busby typing in the data makes a mistake, mostly on the ID number which is a long string of gibberish, and they miss off a character, or hit another one by mistake. So we have a Busby employee staring at their computer screen looking at a bit of data that they have typed in wrong, so what do they do?

They don’t just correct their mistake and get it all working right away. Nope, what they do is this. They fill in another form which contains all the information we sent them, and then a section at the bottom informing us what they typed in wrong, and where they typed it in wrong. They send this form to us, so we can change our system to match their system, so we can then re-put the correct data into our system, flag it as an update to existing data, and resend it to Busby where its printed out and given to the human drones who will then correct the mistake on their system.

Wasting paper, many hours of peoples times, costing money for paper, postage, stamps, wages, and the outcome probably is the person who typo’d the data correcting it.