The Spanish have a pejorative slang term for all the petty bureaucrats that seem to have no other function than to be employed. You know, all the Diversity Outreach Inclusivity Community Coordinator Team Leaders and such like; the sort of people who probably describe themselves as Awareness Raising Activists, and who, lacking any discernible talents or skills, have occupied the positions once held by junior clerks whose functions are now performed by computers – at vastly greater salaries of course. The Spanish term for such useless seat-warmers is ‘Caga Tintas’, which means ink-shitters.
Now I am living in what is euphemistically called ‘social housing’, in a ‘retirement living accommodation complex’ (you begin to see that the main product of caga tintas is meaningless verbiage) I receive a forest’s worth of paper from them through my letterbox every month.
We have a full-time manager for 40 flats who is generally considered by most of the residents to be as useful as a chocolate teapot, in contrast to his predecessor who seems to have been universally appreciated by her charges. Needless to say, we have hardly seen hide or hair of him for the last year and, quite frankly, have not felt the loss overmuch. His main occupation seems to be as a caga tinta.
One of his duties is to produce a monthly newsletter[1] addressing aspects of living here, usually a mess of misinformation and poor English, hastily and inexpertly copied and pasted from council and government web pages. His latest is a triumph and presumably took him longer to print off and distribute than to create. Two sides of A4 are devoted to informing us, some might say badgering us, about the rules of the Covid lockdown, as if we had not heard them by now.
He helpfully provides links, in blue and underlined, to where we can find the government’s advice for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, although why exactly we need to know this during the lockdown is unclear to me. I have tried to click on these links but nothing seems to happen, even when I double-click. Do you think my sheet of paper has a bug?
[1] Very quietly and surreptitiously posted through our letterboxes to avoid any chance of catching him to bring any problems to his attention.