Neither musical or particularly funny, but about fifteen years ago I was working as a technical writer for the Bonneville Power Administration (same outfit Woody Guthrie wrote some songs for—Aha! There's the musical connection!).

On my handy-dandy Tom Swift electric computer, I whipped out a six-page report on a group of residential weatherization inspections and submitted it to Ms. Hickey upstairs as I did several times a week. It was a mess of governmentese and statistical tables (which on one occasion I tried to edit into readable English and got my hand slapped for the effort). Several hours later, I got the report back—all six pages. Ms. Hickey had marked all over each page, but she only wanted me to make one change. Change a semicolon to a comma. I pulled it up, made the change, and printed off a fresh copy—all six pages as she requested, and sent it up to her. The following morning the report was back on my desk again, all marked up and with a note saying that she had decided that the comma turned it into a run-on sentence (at one time she had been a high school English teacher) and wanted it changed back to a semicolon. And please print out a fresh copy. The whole thing. I did as I was bid. Several hours later, back it comes. To make a long and silly story short, it came back twice more for the same flip-flop, complete with a fresh printout of all six pages each time. I think the only reason it finally disappeared was that the report was due and she had to turn it in to the Powers That Be.

This sound like one of those apocryphal stories, but so help me God, it really happened! I have witnesses.

Four thoughts:—
1. For some strange reason, we tended to refer to her as "Picky Hickey."
2. As a general rule, all the Powers That Be really wanted was the first paragraph and one statistical table (most of the rest of it was boilerplate).
3. Where is that paperless office we kept hearing so much about?
4. Throughout her career, how many trees is Ms. Hickey personally responsible for murdering?

Your tax dollars at work.

Don Firth