Bureaucrats vs. Aliens

Sorry I haven't posted in a while; I've been caught up with the fight to achieve something, anything, other than go postal - a feat about as simple as running a marathon while immersed in treacle.

Of late, I've had discussions with a number of people – concerned lay-men, conspiracy theorists and physicists alike – about the existence of aliens. Some believe that they exist, but are uninterested in Earth. Others are of the opinion that they're trying to monitor earth. A sub-set of these believe that the moon – which they think is hollow – is “their Earth monitoring station”. (As an aside, I haven't come across any studies of the moon that used high-powered ground-penetrating radar, so have no idea whether or not the moon is hollow.) Finally, some think that they walk among us undetected.

For years, I was sceptical of the validity of any of these beliefs, not least because all concepts of aliens are rather anthropomorphic in nature. However, I've come to suspect that the people who think that aliens live on earth, monitoring us, are closer to the truth than I'm really comfortable with.

I've always disliked bureaucrats. Not the kind who process your papers and let you go with minimal fuss; the kind who seem to go out of their way to make your life a misery until you can finally terminate your dealings with them. You know the kind I mean, yes? I created a suggestion – to shock people into laughter – that there was a farm somewhere that cloned these people with a complete inability to understand logic or have human emotions of any kind.

Last night, I watched Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a local amateur theatre. It brought to mind an old observation that people in Zimbabwean government offices bore a striking similarity – in personality, not looks (mostly) – to Vogons. However, upon reflection, I've encountered Vogon-like creatures in government offices the world over.

Is it possible that aliens do, indeed, walk among us, monitoring our progress as a species? Let's say that this is true, placing them in government offices would be the perfect way of collecting data on humankind. They would be able to track, with great precision, the human population – births, deaths, immigrations/emigrations, marriages, employment and salary histories, everything.

Let's look objectively at it. Vogons require all documents to be produced in triplicate; bureaucrats do too. Vogons are hellishly painful to listen to, as are bureaucrats. Vogons see it as their personal duty to make anyone and everyone's lives as difficult and uncomfortable as possible, a personality trait they share with the majority of staff in the civil service.

So, I have concluded that the conspiracy theorists are on the money: aliens walk among us and I've found where they live undetected. They hide in the civil service, disguised among their human colleagues, making our lives hell while they conduct some complex socio-behavioural experiment.