Bloody Bureaucrats

Those of you who read this blog who know me in real life know how much loathing I have for bureaucrats.

"Mindless." "Stupid." "Totally Fucked." These are just a few of the things I call them.

Now before we all get into a pissing competition about which country/state/city has the dumbest, most mindless bureaucrats, I will say that wherever you find bureaucrate, they are the dumbest and most mindless.

I think it was one of Newton's Laws... the one that says that for every action, there must be an equal and opposit reaction. Or to translate... wherever there's someone trying to get something done, there's a bureaucrat standing in his or her way with a list of extremely stupid rules.

Right here in Oz, we have bureaucrats who can hold their own with the best of them... like my friends over at the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (the government body that looks after drugs, vitamins and things medicinal). They tried explaining why it's illegal in Australia to make a health claim about food by saying, and this is a direct quote, "food is for nutrition, and nutrition has nothing to do with your health". Sadly, I couldn't convince them to put that in writing on government letterhead.

Today, another shipment of Whey Protein arrived from the Excited States. This time, we were reasonably sure we'd crossed all the "t's" and dotted all the "i's" because we definitely didn't want a repeat of what happened with the last shipment.

And the Quarantine Inspector looks over the paperwork and says "where's the Jembrana Certificate?"

"The what?", says I, frantically running my finger down the conditions in our import permit, trying to see whatever it was I'd missed.

"Jembrana. You're supposed to have a certificate".

Oh. Um. Ok. That it wasn't in the conditions of the import permit is covered by the clause that says stuff like "AQIS (that's what they're called... the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service) can alter the conditions of the permit at any time. Great. Well done AQIS. It might have helped in you'd actually told me.

So I headed back to the office to look it up and before I tell you what I found, let me give you a bit of background. We get our Whey Protein Shakes mix from a little factory in Pittsburg Pennsylvania. It's truly yummy. They get the raw whey isolate from whoever it is that extracts the whey from the milk after the cheesmakers have thrown it away. The cheesemakers get the milk from... um... milk factories I suppose, who get it from farms anyplace they can.

Last time, the Quarantine inspectors wanted a certificate, signed by the USDA Chief Veterenarian, certifying that the farm the milk came from was BSE free. Stupidly, I wrote back telling them that the cow's name was Daisy, and she grazed on the south west pasture of a farm on Skunk Creek Road, Beaver Falls Minnesota. I shouldn't have done that. One of the prerequisites for getting a job in the bureaucracy is that you must have no sense of humour. Eventually, we reached the conclusion that if it was a bloody certificate they wanted, then we'd better get them one.

They also wanted a certificate from the USDA stating that no milk from sick cows is used for human consumption in the United States, to which the USDA vet I was speaking to replied "don't be insulting". AQIS explained that they can't have one rule for countries that know what they're doing, and another rule for the countries that suck. I said "yes you can, you have dozens of rules like that", but no-one was listening so eventually, they got that certificate too..

The other thing they wanted, and this was where we REALLY came unstuck last time, was a certificate showing that the meat and eggs used to make the whey came from cows that are BSE free. (That cows don't lay eggs seemed to have escaped the sharp minds at AQIS.)

It took four weeks to get past that condition, because I just couldn't provide that certificate. Why? No... it wasn't because of the cow/egg thing, though come to think of it, that might have been a big hurdle. I couldn't get that certificate because there is NO meat or eggs in whey protein... it's made from milk. Therefore, no-one could give me a certificate saying it was anything in relation to eggs or meat. It wasn't good enough that I provided a manufacturer's declaration to that effect... the certificate was on the list, so the certificate I had to get!

Oh... I digress... sorry... back to Jembrana. I looked it up...

It's a disease found in ONE very specific breed of cattle that's ONLY found in East Java, Indonesia, not to far from Bali.

"But we've already provided documentation that this product is manufactured in the USA, from American milk. Um... Bali's nowhere near Pennsylvania."

The shipment's still in quarantine pending the arrival of new paperwork.