A New Office Text

The Office Texts that feature in Words & Pictures (there were two or four of them in the shows in Belfast, Sheffield and Leeds) were all inspired by our real life encounters with "bureaucracy gone mad" and weirdly unhelpful working practices. After the Sheffield show we got a great email from audience member David Singh, which included the following Office Text-style experience. Thanks to David for letting me quote it here.

I once had a temping job at a council. My mornings were spent wrestling with an archaic printing machine churning out huge rolls of concertina-folded paper that had something to do with tax. These were later "processed" by others in the department whilst I scanned hand-written documents into a computer. In the afternoon I was given back the day's printouts along with printouts of the documents I'd been scanning all morning. I then took these mountains of paper up to the third floor and filed them into cardboard boxes. A whole room was dedicated to these boxes, and I was told to be meticulous about the filing. At the end of every week I was tasked to remove the oldest of the cardboard boxes, and unceremoniously bin them. This surprised me at first and I asked a colleague if the files had ever been used, ever been accessed. I was told not. I asked why. I was told that there hadn't been an audit. I asked when the last audit was. I was told there hadn't been one before, and that there were no plans for one in the future.