The little black book of red tape

the long version

Everyone has a call-centre story or some nightmare encounter at the hands of 'customer services' to relate. This book is a kind of compendium of such stories, a sort of almanac of the bullshit of the modern world, and a catalogue of individual heroic battles against the corporate state. It features the Derby householder who is selling off minute plots of his back garden to well wishers around the world for 1p each to prevent the council putting a bypass through it; the Shropshire bus service that doesn't stop as 'stopping disrupts the timetable'; and the hospital recently fined 2.5 million for using 'spare capacity' to treat patients quickly.