I used to work inside a bureaucratic process. Now I am blissfully free of it until something like this comes up. Then all the old frustrations and anger boils to the surface and I have trouble being kind and polite. I wrote a cover letter for Wakana yesterday and started it with all the words I love to say to them. Then I carefully deleted those words and fed them the line of BS they want to hear.

Note: I worked for INS as a GS-5 temporary part-time inspector in 1981-1982. At that time ALL immigration records were actual paper documents in an actual file folder. We heard that the central office had misplaced 20,000 files and were scrambling to find them. Now it is 2008 and the new system apparently is STILL using paper files and has little or nothing on computer. Sigh, my country right or wrong? I keep thinking about how the Japanese use computers in their government offices and hospitals. I know they can work properly. I just don't understand why the USA can't make it work. I saw the same inability in my job working for the Navy.