Bureaucracy

One of the comic strips I follow on gocomics.com is Pluggers.  It's a cartoon strip about the life of "pluggers," square rural blue-collar Americans of a certain age who lack the health, wealth and sophistication of the big cities. (The anti-Kardashians, you might say.) The strip shows them as cartoon animals, with the writing coming from readers like in that old strip They'll Do It Every Time.  The other day one episode had the caption "Senior pluggers have always been 'green,'" and showed a dog-man paying for a cafeteria meal and saying, "I hope you take cash here."

That cartoon reminded me of something.  Thirty-two years ago I was playing Bureaucracy, an interactive computer game created by Douglas Adams for Infocom. (Their most popular games were the Zork cave adventure series and an adaption of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) We got this game at the same time as our new Atari 2600 computer, and that was one of the only games compatible with it.  You have to do stuff like feed a llama so you can get a letter from a mailbox without his tongue getting in the way, or withdraw money from a bank by making a negative deposit, or climb up an airport pillar and sneak into the air traffic controllers tower so you can tell them to delay the takeoff of a flight that you'd otherwise miss! (Adams later created the game Starship: Titanic, which sounds fun but I never got around to buying it.)

In one part of the game, you eat food in a restaurant that only accepts cash, which you don't have, so what you have to do is sneak out and stiff them!  This actually happened to Adams in real life once, which I know because of the game's cheat tips.

Back in 1987 you couldn't get cheat tips online, but you could buy them in a booklet where you could see the questions you wanted answered but the answers only became visible when you rubbed a special marker on them. Except that we got the computer and the game in Moncton, N.B., and it was Donald who got the cheat sheet in Toronto, so we'd have to phone him and ask questions that he'd answer from the booklet.  The booklet also had cheat tips for the game Hollywood Hijinx (it was a sort of scavenger hunt on an eccentric movie mogul's estate), which I also ended up buying and playing, but by this time I'd got hold of the booklet and could look up the answers myself.

Another thing I remember is that when we first inserted the game in the computer, all we could get was a notice saying, "Warning:  contents may be damaged!" (It was some glitch in the computer-- Father always would buy the cheapest model in the store...) Which fit into the spirit of the game, of course.

Another thing that Pluggers cartoon reminded me was that I'd read (in Harper's, I think) that today things are developing into a system where the rich use plastic and the poor use cash!  It's similar to how every economy with two types of currency will do that:  it used to be that the rich used silver and gold coins while the poor used copper coins...