Saturday, September 15, 2018

Encounters with bureaucRats, episode 2



The bureaucRatic mind-- if it exists at all-- is a small, rigid thing. It has no capacity to deal with things it doesn't already understand.

My first car was an electric car-- yes, I have always been an environmentalist. When I went to the DMV office to register the car, they had their standard questions about the vehicle. But the answers weren't standard.

The DMV-bot asked the make and model. She'd never heard of either the make or model, but she dutifully typed that into the form. Then came the really confusing (to her) parts.

She asked how many cylinders the car had. Well, it was electric, so it didn't have any cylinders. That's not how electric motors work. I said "Zero". The woman said she couldn't put that- it had to be 4, 6, or 8 cylinders. I told her again it doesn't have cylinders. She just looked skeptical and moved on.

Next question: What fuel, gasoline or diesel? I said-- for the third or fourth time at this point-- that it was electric. It didn't use gas or diesel; it had no fuel tank. Only batteries and a charger. I plug it into an extension cord. Its fuel is electricity. That's all.

I got blank stares from her. She typed, collected money, and when she handed me the registration I discovered I had probably the world's only 4 cylinder electric car that ran on gas. I just laughed and showed it to people to illustrate the stupidity of those people.

And people wonder why I consider the bureaucRatic mind to most likely be a myth.
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