Corro-sion

[luckycanuck]

Today I answered letters and e-mails.  Or to put it more accurately, I cleared a lot of corro without actually responding to much of it.

A stack of letters has been building up on my desk.  That stack is now much shorter.  Some of the things I chose not to respond to are shocking.  One man wanted to follow up a letter that had been sent to him by W in January.  Sounds reasonable?  Sure.  Except that this was January 1999.  The fact that eleven years had passed, that nobody except W is still in the office, and that W has long since left the portfolio he was in at the time didn't stop him from assuming that we would have detailed knowledge of his particular case.  I politely informed him that there was nothing our office could do on this matter, that we no longer had access to that letter, and that he may wish to contact the department.  It took a herculean effort not to draft a response that consisted entirely of the words... "Dear A**hole, Are you f*cking serious?"

Another, couple wrote a, letter, that was, one, paragraph, long, and still managed to have, 32, commas, in, the, text.  Also they, put exclamation, points in!  At random, places.  Also they, wanted me to tell, them, who was Prime, Minister in, the 1950s as they, couldn't remember.  They even, ended the, letter by saying "Yours, sincerely"  I passed that, letter, on to another, office, for a response!

Some correspondence, however, is not especially asinine.  It is just a waste of time.  A lot of people just want to write in to tell us what they think.  Now I do read what comes in, and I notice what people are saying, but most of the letters I sorted through today consisted of people having a spray on a variety of topics.  They want a charter of rights or they don't like asylum seekers or they think Rudd is a terrible Prime Minister.  In any event, often there is either nothing I can do to help them with their concerns, or their opinions are not going to shift our policies.  About the only think I can do in many cases is to acknowledge their correspondence and say "there there."  Nothing real is accomplished, but a lot of time is taken up.

As an aside, while I never would vote for the man in a million years, I felt a bit bad for Gordon Brown last week when he was caught slagging off a voter once he got inside his car.  I think he was wrong and he has got to go, but I know that dealing with the public on a constant basis is wearing.  I'm also glad that my ruminations are not constantly recorded for posterity.

But it's not all bad news.  Sometimes really interesting things come in, and sometimes I am reminded that I can actually do something useful to help people.  We got an e-mail from a man who has an interest in military history, and he told us about a bomber that was being piloted by an Australian pilot that crashed into a swamp in Germany in 1943, killing all on board.  The body of the pilot has never been recovered, and the plane now lies partially buried in a bog.  It looks like I might be able to do something that might get the body of a 21 year old pilot from Maryborough (and the bodies of five others who have not been recovered) out of a bog and into proper graves.  Recently the bodies of some Australian WWI soldiers were recovered in Fromelles on the Somme and others were found in Borneo and brought home.  There was a lot of public interest in those cases, and there may be in this too.

This is something I can actually help with, it's interesting, and it brings me into contact with people who are level headed and know what they are talking about.  It's not some yahoo having a rant about the topic du jour.

TW: 100 bicep curls with 10 pullups at the end of every set.  I made it in two sets of 70 and 30.  100 seated rows, 50 forearm curls, 30 more pullups.

Then trivia which we won.  More geography cleverness.