Arts and Crafts Day Hooray!

Part of my job involves signing documents that are worth considerable amounts of money to other government institutions. Some of these places put special rules on the documents they receive and they try to impose what they will or will not accept. One of these places, I won't mention which, has special rules that make them hate me everytime I send them a document that has some boilerplate rules on the second page that they don't want to see. They call me and tell me, "Marty we hate you and we don't want to see these rules you have on your document and you smell bad." I can't change the boilerplate because it is populated automatically. So that leaves me with the option of arguing with them that they should ignore these rules since it doesn't apply to them, or allowing them to change the document. Either way takes more of my time then I would prefer. So I came up with a third solution, and it's lots of fun!

But every time I do this I feel like it's arts and crafts day back in kindergarten! What happens is I print out the document, then take the page with the offending rules, and cute a slip of paper to cover up the inch and a half (approx) area where these rules are on the document. I take that covered sheet over to the copier and print out a new copy that should have the rules they don't like blanked out. But of course the first time I do it the sheet slips and I end up covering things I shouldn't and I have to do it again. Then on the second try it goes a little crooked and it shaves off most of what needs to go away but maybe leaves like a sliver of a sentence. So then I have to get rid of that. But eventually I have a reasonably neat new copy of that page. It makes me want to get out some glue and sprinkles and make glue drawings of like an eagle or something and attached that to the back of the document with a statement like, "Hey I made this for you guys while I was signing this document, I hope your whole office enjoys it!" And if everyone did it then I could like, hang up my favorite pieces around the office, and when someone came by I could be like, "Oh yeah, that's my favorite, I got it from my buddy at the Department of Homeland Security, he's got a real talent for line drawing/financial management documents."

How cool would that be? Different government organizations trading artwork they made themselves with the mundane documents and memos they send around. Of course then people would start making up ridiculous rules about what we could and couldn't send them, "All cross stitch patterns must contain less then 10% red thread." or "All crayon drawings must go through an approval process from your legal staff before we accept them." But that would lead to things like me getting a call from the legal staff, "Marty, was this supposed to be a drawing of a dinosaur? Because if so it is wildly unacceptable to our standards here. You need to colour inside the lines..." Only government bureaucracy could make arts and crafts no fun.