Mackeson Drinker's story reminded me of this
A mate of mine used to work for the Ministry of Agriculture (MAFF).

He was recruited to MAFF in the mid 90s. One of his tasks was to check the amount of oil they had in store and report it to another department.

The report had developed over a long time. It had been put on a spreadsheet, and charts had been made from the figures.

Not being one of nature's civil servants, he phoned the other department and asked what they did with the report. They said they looked at it and then filed it away. They didn't do anything with the actual figures.

He decided to get to the bottom of the report. After some time, he found out that the report was originally asked for during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Most departments had been told the report was no longer necessary. Not so MAFF. So, a civil servant had been assigned to produce this oil report for around 40 years, for no reason whatsoever.

Good old British Civil Service.
(Tont, Fri 24 Feb 2012, 23:43, 1 reply)

A Local Butcher
Who also has a slaughterhouse was contacted many years ago by MAFF via letter, they had to fill in a form saying how many cattle /pigs/ sheep etc they slaughtered per year as they were concerned about the amount of blood that was entering the drains. The reply came back with words to the effect that for one thing it would be X amount of blood from the total amount of cattle they killed per annum as, according to MAFF's estimation, each animal slaughtered would yield around FORTY gallons of blood! Well I did say they knew 'nowt' about cattle didn't I?
(Mackeson_drinker, Sun 26 Feb 2012, 7:17, closed)