THANK YOU FOR
YOUR INTEREST
T
HAT’S HOW THE letters
always start, responding to some
comment or complaint you’ve
made to a government department, a
parliamentarian or a large company. The
words might not always be exactly those,
but the sentiment is.
I have a truly sad bit of news for you.
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mean what they say. Usually they don’t
give a bugger. This becomes obvious
when you read further and realise that
what you have in your hand is what’s
called a boilerplate response. At its
extreme it is a paragraph or set of
paragraphs which is the same in just
about every response they send out, with
just your name and the problem you
have mentioned inserted in the template.
How does it work? An old joke tells of
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complaint about cockroaches on a train
to the president of the railroad. He
receives a reply apologising
profusely; insisting that nobody
else has ever mentioned the
problem; assuring the writer
that the president will give this
his urgent attention by
personally checking the train
carriage in question and by
summarily dismissing the
staff responsible for the
roaches being there.
His original
note had
unintentionally
been attached to
the back of the
response.
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over the president’s
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this guy the
cockroach letter.”
I get a fair bit of this.
In my attempts to “speak
truth to power” I send
quite a few letters to the
various ‘authorities’,
mainly about their lack of interest in
motorcycling and motorcyclists. Every
now and then you get a hit; writing to the
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were not available for motorcycles in
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boilerplate about how they took their
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answer was not much use to me; it said
that custom plates were only for vehicles.
I asked what motorcycles were if they
weren’t vehicles (and wondered if this
meant that I would no longer have to pay
ego and insurance) but got a boilerplate
return that didn’t even mention the
question, never mind an answer.
My favourite is a telephone
conversation with one of the
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relations. This was years ago when I was
a student journo, and I was writing about
criticism leveled at the cops for their
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demonstrations. I wasn’t getting
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other end of the phone, so I
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perhaps a little more... forceful
because of what they
thought of the
demonstrators? “The
job of the police is
not to think,” was the
response.
I would have quite
a collection of
boilerplate letters if
I’d kept them. As it
was I generally
shredded them or
threw them away –
quite enthusiastically.
There is one lot I’ve
kept. Over several years,
they trace my attempt to
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was overseas with the
bike. You might be
surprised that this was(and possibly still is) possible, even
without a green slip. All you had to do
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insurance fees.
I wrote to the RTA, thanking them for
allowing me to insure the bike despite
being outside Australia. Among a lot of
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response was that I was not insured
outside Australia. The policy only
covered me at home. I wrote back to say
that they surely didn’t expect me to pay
for useless insurance. They did expect
exactly that, they replied, although it was
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think that was fair. They wrote to
intimate that fairness didn’t enter into it- by simply sending me the same letter
as before. I demanded that they register
the bike with no further argument; they
had banked my cheque for the rego.
Eventually I got a real letter written by a
real person who conceded that they
might, at their discretion, refund the 3rd
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I could prove that the bike had been
outside Australia for the entire term
of the insurance.
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snail mail, and the rego year was over. I
theoretically would have been due for
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registering a bike overseas could only
be done for one year. I couldn’t
have registered the bike again even if
I’d wanted to.
I didn’t, and let the rego lapse.
But don’t take this as a suggestion that
you shouldn’t write to the authorities.
Even if they send you crap in response,
they do note your letters. Especially your
local member of parliament, whom you
can reach in two ways: a direct letter, or
a letter to your local paper. All
parliamentarians read the local papers in
their electorates; they know that their
voters read them, too. Keep chipping
away at the boilerplate. We can
eventually get something done. D
BEARFACED