PAPER CHASE

Dick Pountain/14 July 2010 13:52/Idealog 192

"I'll go to Morra to post that letter"/"Why not post it today?" We never tire of that dumb joke. Morra is a tiny village in the valley in the Umbro-Cortonese mountains where I live for half the year, and its equally tiny post office has stone walls, a terracotta roof and just the one postmaster who does everything and lives next to the shop. Whatever reason you have for visiting Morra post-office, you will not get out in less than half-an-hour. Rural Italians use the post-office as a bank far more than for communication, so the queue is mostly people depositing or withdrawing money, or paying bills. And every transaction takes at least ten minutes, thanks to the wonders of Information Technology.

Morra post-office is not short of digital equipment - in fact it's crammed with the stuff. In one corner sits a large cabinet full of blinkenlights signifying multiple ADSL lines, while the post-master has a large flat-screen monitor at his right shoulder, but he actually faces The Beast. This apparatus is the key to the whole enterprise (perhaps the key to whole Italian economy). It's as high as his head, as wide as a photocopier, and has a wide mouth beneath a drum-shaped top, all in regulation beige plastic. It's probably made by Olivetti, Seimens-Nixdorf or some similar corporate IT behemoth from a barely-remembered generation.

What The Beast does is suck in documents, scan them, OCR them and then print them out again. The post-master spends much of his time neurotically stroking documents on The Beast's lower lip to make sure they're not too creased for it to eat. Whenever you pay a bill - for dustbin collection, car tax or whatever - you get sent in the post a pair of coupons which you take to post office, sign in the appropriate places and he feeds them to The Beast. Sometimes these forms are more complicated and so The Beast regurgitates them several times for you to sign in various places and swallows them again. This whole magnificent edifice forms an interface between a 19th-century paper-based bureaucracy and a modern computer-based communications network, whose sole purpose is to transfer pieces of paper, rather than digital information, from one place to another. Unlike the internet it keeps people employed, which is a good thing - a Morra post-office website wouldn't have the same atmosphere - but it's at least three times slower than a wholly paper-based system would have been, even one that used quill pens and inkwells. 

Now I've written plenty about the paperless office debacle in this column over the years, and have no wish to revisit that topic - suffice it to state Pountain's Law, which is that whatever advances are made in communication bandwidth and computational power, three-quarters of the human population will combine together in a conspiracy to fritter them away entirely, the net result being a very slow *diminution* in efficiency. I belong to that other quarter (perhaps it's only one-hundredth, though I'd like to believe not) who are very happy indeed to have the more tedious aspects of our lives eased by digital tricks.

The reason I can live in rural Italy five months of the year is that I do all my editing work via email, pay my VAT and income tax via www.hmrc.gov.uk, do all my banking online, and even sign business documents in PDF form using Adobe Acrobat (which almost everyone except Barclay's bank now accepts). However it's all still very far from being seamless. There are passwords and PINs to remember, and particularly horrendous ones where government is concerned. When registering for VAT online they insisted on sending me a one-off, scratch-card code by post to my doormat in London, which a neighbour had to collect and read to me over the phone...

I wrote here in approving terms of the iPad a couple of months ago, and although I still haven't had my hands on one  I remain convinced that its user interface points in the direction we must go. Here's how I imagine things might work in future: I receive an email telling me my motorbike tax is due, with a link to a page of a government website. I go there and then drag the icon for my bank onto the appropriate place on the page; it pops up a box asking for me to authorise the payment; I click the button and the payment is made. Both the necessary passwords are stored locally on my machine, and neither institution - transport department or bank - gets to see the other one. They are temporarily connected via my machine, for the duration of this one transaction, which requires just two clicks from me.

There's nothing technical to stop such a system from being implemented right now: all the obstacles are to do with existing laws, existing working practices, existing mental attitudes, paranoia and the sheer weight of those bloody-minded three quarters of the population who are determined that it will not be made to work. I'm not unaware of the problem of how to redeploy those employed in the bureaucracy who're no longer needed, but that's a political problem not a technical one, and I think I've made my opinions in that domain abundantly clear without repeating  them here (cue sound effect of noisy expectoration).