Bureaucracy is alive and well it would seem in Victoria and probably everywhere. The Association sent a letter to Regional Roads Victoria’s office in Bendigo via registered post. 15 July was the date it was sent and Bendigo is just over 2 hours from Swan Hill (where the letter was sent from). However, it still is yet to arrive and here we are the 16 August.

All that aside, Australia Post (the Courier) then asked us to contact Regional Roads Victoria to see if by any chance they had actually received the letter and it wasn’t scanned in? I asked them to contact Regional Roads Victoria to ask them themselves as they were the ones who had lost the letter in the first place. But I was told that they couldn’t do that due to privacy regulations. This is Bureaucracy number one.

Bureaucracy number two. So I contacted Regional Roads Victoria, used their website to get the number for the Bendigo Office. Phone number for Loddon Mallee branch isn’t there incidentally. They also state on their Contact page of their website that if I wanted to, I could use the “send an enquiry using the feedback button at the bottom right corner of each page”. Unfortunately, on the contact page, or any page for that matter, there is no feedback button at the bottom right corner.

So I rang the 133778 number on the website and spoke with Jack (no surname given) somewhere, maybe Melbourne, who knows, he never said. I related the tale of the lost letter and he said he would contact the Bendigo branch, let them know my phone number and email address so they could text me either a yes or no regarding the letter. Now at no stage did Jack ask what organisation I represented and I didn’t volunteer that information either. I guess in theory if they did receive the letter and opened it they would see my name, oh and my phone number and email address.

So I asked if I could have the email address to send the letter that way. He said that the Branch could give me that information if they chose too.

The saga continues.