Shocked civil servants were at a loss today as to what to make of a phone call from a service user who apparently had no complaint to make. A member of helpline staff at the DVLA took the call yesterday afternoon from an office worker in Chelmsford. The man claimed he had just felt like saying thanks for their online car tax renewal facility which had saved him wasting his lunch-break braving a squally shower and a post office queue, where he later found out there had been a fight, an incontinence episode and someone trying to pay for their TV license with softmints which had held up the queue for ages.

‘I just kept waiting for the ‘but’ and it never came’ said the Helpline assistant at the Swansea-based offices, ‘It got a bit awkward really. He said it was a really easy system to use, really quick, and had saved him a lot of bother. ‘A great example of a successful government IT project adding real value to people’s lives’ he said. Trouble was, our customer care helpline software doesn’t have a drop-down for any of that so I had to pass him on to a supervisor’.

The caller was then passed up the chain of command as increasingly senior civil servants pored through procedure documents in an attempt to log the issue. Eventually the Secretary of State for Transport, Geoff Hoon was called out of a meeting to take the call. Similarly stumped, Mr Hoon apologized profusely for the general crapness of the entire government and offered to resign immediately.

The call eventually returned some two hours later to the original operator on the helpline. ‘At this point the bloke had had enough’, he said. ‘Bloody helpline system, bloody paper-pushers, bloody waste of tax money’. He was fuming. So I ticked the boxes for complaints about ‘attitude of staff’, ‘query not resolved’ and ‘abusive customer’ which meant I was no longer obliged to manage his call, so I hung up’.

‘Back then, people seemed to think that that anything was possible,’ said Neville Bradshaw, head of the commission set up to investigate the validity of non-traditional city design techniques. ‘Cities in the sky they said, and a robot to make your dinner and do the Hoovering. Then to cap it all, this group of rockers came along singing about building a city on nothing more than Rock and Roll!’

No one expected the planning department to even consider this unconventional proposal, but the cost implications attracted the attention of the cash-strapped city’s accountants. ‘Of course everyone who was not in the know got very excited,’ said Bradshaw, ‘thinking this was the end of costly and complex demographic studies and utility planning. Just build whole cities on an abstract concept – on a sound, a type of hard to define modern music.’

In addition, witnesses recall that the band’s presentation was much easier to understand for everyone in the Mayor’s office who knew nothing about building or architecture. Awkward questions as to the durability of rock music as a building material were answered with very confident assertions from fellow rock musicians who claimed that ‘Rock and Roll will never die’ and that ‘Rock and Roll is here to stay.’ ‘I remember them all looking really impressed by that,’ said the Mayor’s secretary. ‘But by then the planning meeting had kinda degenerated; all the guys were pretending to play the guitar and shaking their heads up and down.’

Unfortunately Los Angeles lies on the San Andreas fault and the commission has concluded that ‘Rock and Roll’ may not provide adequate foundations in the event of even a minor earthquake. During a minor tremor last week, a number of homes were destroyed in the west of the city. The now semi-retired rockers of Starship, happened to be listening back to their most successful record at full volume at their home in Beverly Hills when walls collapsed and the roof caved in. After they were rescued from the rubble, one band member was heard to slur ‘Yeah man, that rocks!’

Red Squirrels are now almost completely extinct in England, barring a few isolated off-shore colonies in islands such as Anglesey and the Isle of Man. But finally the red squirrels are leading a fight back. Rodent intelligence sources suggest they are planning a three pronged attack on the British mainland, eventually linking up with reds in the Scottish highlands, then to march south and confront the grey squirrels in large numbers.

However the invasion plans have met with the early hitch in that the Isle of Wight squirrels are unable to cross the Solent, and the reds have now appealed to Britain’s human population to supply little boats and acorn-sized grenades.

The squirrels are particularly hoping for support from their human ‘ginger brothers’ who ‘know all about persecution’ to join their ranks for the big counter-offensive. However, the British government seems unwilling to become dragged into another messy sectarian war, particularly against American squirrels. ‘If they were Islamic squirrels, it might be different.’

Davster