It is not as elegant as one of Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to his Son”, but it gives an excellent insight into the workings of the mind of a senior government official, one of those “mandarins”, as they are more commonly referred to, who supervise the vast and ponderous machinery of the country’s cumbersome bureaucracy.
It is a letter written by a mandarin, on the eve of his retirement, to a young nephew who has just been appointed to a minor position in some ministry in Athens.
This is how it goes:
My Dear Nephew,
First let me congratulate you on your appointment as a permanent civil servant. As you know, nothing can budge you from your employment during the next thirty-five years except death, a gross misdemeanor, or your resignation following your marriage to the heavily-dowried daughter of a shipowner or industrialist. But do not have any illusions in this respect because it takes brains to marry money and if you had any you wouldn’t have entered the civil service in the first place.
From now on, you owe allegiance to nobody except the all-powerful State which is your employer and, of course, to me who got you the job. If you do your duty by the State (and by me) you have nothing to worry about. You will receive regular promotion and you will eventually reach the age of retirement, as I have done, with all the benefits that go with it, including a couple of well-paid appointments to the Board of Directors of state-owned companies.
In your first post you will probably have to learn some kind of routine that is not very difficult but which, with a little practice, you can build up into a small mountain of paper work that might even fool your superiors. Remember that the first civil servant devised at least five complicated procedures in his department so that he could get jobs for five of his relatives and that every subsequent civil servant has done the same. So, in any self-respecting administration, the work that could be done by one man must be shared-out among at least a hundred people. Each of these is therefore faced with the problem of how to do nothing, yet appear to be on the verge of collapse from overwork.
I do not know what your specific job in the Ministry is going to be but if you watch your colleagues, you will soon get the hang of it. Two neat stacks of files on each side of your desk, three open ledgers before you and a constantly ringing phone are standard equipment. (The best way to have a constantly ringing phone is to write the number up in about a dozen phone booths under the name “Mimi” with your office hours. When it rings you can pretend to be carrying on an official conversation even after the amorous gentleman on the other end has hung up in disgust.) An added touch is half-open drawers with more piles of official-looking documents in them. All except the middle drawer in your desk in which you will keep your mid-morning sandwich or cheese pie, but more about that later. If you have any high-minded idea about being of service to the public and that, after all, it is the taxpayer who is paying your salary, forget it. I can assure you that if the taxpayer had any say in fixing your emoluments you would die of slow starvation. Your salary is paid by the State and the State rakes in its revenues by squeezing the taxpayer to the limit. The taxpayer should therefore always be made to toe the line and abide by the bureaucratic procedures which have been so carefully and assiduously built up over the years by many generations of former colleagues. Moreover, these procedures are backed by reams of legislation which means that by applying them strictly you are merely upholding the law of the land.
You will find, in your contacts with the public, that there are two types of person you generally have to deal with. The first is the timid mouse who will do anything you say in order to get his papers processed as quickly as possible except perhaps if you tell him to jump off the roof of the building—although some have been known to do that on their own initiative after spending fruitless months running around from one ministry to another trying to disentangle themselves from some bureaucratic nightmare. The other is the roaring lion who tries to get the upper hand by throwing his weight around and trying to intimidate you. The way to deal with such a person is first to ask him for his identity card. If he is not carrying it with him you can smile sadly at him and say there is nothing you can do for him since you have no official proof that he exists. If he does have an identity card and has placed his signature on any of the documents he hands you, you can tell him to have the authenticity of his signature attested to by the officer on duty at the nearest police station. When he returns, three hours later, you will re-examine his papers and discover that he has not affixed the necessary excise stamps on them – the almighty hartosima which have the power of turning even a scrap of tissue into a legal document.
“Nobody told me my papers needed hartosima, “he will shout indignantly as he trudges off to the cafe in the basement of the Ministry or to the kiosk on the other side of the road to acquire them. When he returns, you can keep him waiting for another ten minutes while you nibble on the sandwich or cheese pie you have removed from your middle drawer. He will not dare to interrupt you for fear of getting grease stains on his precious papers. If the phone rings in the meantime with someone asking for Mimi, you can pretend it is the Minister himself calling for you, leave your desk in a hurry and go and chat for about fifteen minutes with one of the secretaries in the typing pool.
When you finally get back to him you will find him considerably chastened and when you are satisfied that he is no longer a roaring lion but about to assume the proper humility of a timid mouse, you can look through his papers again, send him to a senior colleague on another floor to have them initialed, bring them back to you again and then send them off to the Protocol Office to have them filed and given a priority number. Finally, you can tell him to come back in about a week to ten days during which time, you explain, it is entirely possible that the Protocol Office may have routed the papers back to you and you may have had the time to do whatever has to be done with them. From then onwards, there are endless opportunities open to you. You can tell him the wording in his papers was not entirely according to form and that they will have to be rewritten, that he needs more documents from at least three other ministries or that the law has changed and he needs more hartosima. With luck, you can keep him running around for at least three months. And with practice, you can keep at least three out of ten people you come into contact with running around for six months at a time, the object, of course, being to create more work and hopefully more positions in the civil service for some of your own or your wife’s relatives.
Finally, do not be frightened by all this talk of administrative reform and more efficiency from government services to cope with the requirements of our entry into the Common Market. The Common Market bureaucracy is the largest in Europe and when we join, we can teach them a thing or two about how to make it the largest in the world.
