FORM-FILLING

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4563, 22 April 1942, Page 6

FORM-FILLING

VIRULENT DISEASE The form-filling disease: “A sow was sold,” writes a London Times correspondent. “There had therefore to be a certificate all about it, and a duplicate copy of the certificate. This sort of thing that makes people wonder if the great waste-paper campaign ought not to be directed more against preventing the waste of paper than toward the collecting of paper already wasted. Consider the sow and the certificate. The sow was ‘Lot No, 103,’ the ‘No. of Pigs in Lot’ was one and the sow weighed 17sc. 41b; the price per score was 15s, so that the sew fetched £l3 0s 3d, less 2s insurance, leaving £l2 18s 3d, which was certified correct, checked and signed by a certifying officer.. This little transaction gets at least two copies of a certificate that is one-third the size of a “Times” page. The sow that was Lot 103 looks a forlorn creature in the 15 columns and 30 lines that are on the certificate in case she arrived with lots of ‘pigs up to 9sc.,’ rising in four sections to ‘over 12sc.,’ or rigs, stags, boars, or ‘others.’ Then she had another six columns for a summary of all that has gone before, with provision to add transit shrinkage.’ The waste paper campaign will certainly flourish if there is no shrinkage in the amount of paper with which the sale of a sow is officially blessed.”