Please leave current work and communications in your PENDING BASKET or open basket stacks near your desk.

The way for an HCO to confess to me that it isn't doing its job now that tech problems are solved is to write me as follows:

It is HCO Policy of long standing that items in progress must be locatable on the visible lines of the office.

Dear Ron,

When work or current despatches are hidden away in desks, nothing can be located in an emergency. The result is endless searching.

We are having a dreadful time with low units. We have had to loan money to the Central Org even though you forbade it. We're sorry we can't pay for any of the books we're selling. We are having trouble finding good personnel. Here are some newspaper clippings – we are sorry it's bad publicity but PE made a mistake. We are not able to get out our bulletins because we haven't any money for HCO staff.

In that I have to personally keep this office manned after 5:30 p.m. and during weekends, the least you can do to help me is keep work in progress and current despatches visible, not hidden away. I must have spent twenty hours in the last month trying to find despatches, work and bulletins on these comm lines, usually without result.

Oh yes, here's a clipping that says the Medical Association is after quacks and also here are a number of bad letters from the public.

Keep work in progress and current despatches in your basket stations not in your desks.

Use your pending baskets for current work.

Liberally translated this or any part of this reads in fact:

Keep your in baskets empty.

Dear Ron,

Keep work in progress in full view.

We are really goofing here in HCO. We get HCO Bulletins all right but we don't make them stick.

It will assist me enormously during your off hours.

Quality is terrible in the HGC and Academy but of course that has nothing to do with us.

We made sure we didn't get a good staff staff auditor for Lists 1 and 2. We got one who propitiates and can't do a Security Check.

We'd like to get the Central Org on the ball but we can't confront how upset they get so we don't usually show them any policy letters. If any of your postulates stick here, they come in on a rumor line and get to Central Org by accident.

Clearing the public would take much too long so we abandoned it. It may not be true anyway. Certainly we're still aberrated.

Hope you are as apathetic as we are.

P.S. We'll see if we can't keep technical at an even lower level. Then we can all go broke.

If the above bears any relation to persons living or dead, it is purely coincidental. Just assign it to my worse nature after working all night trying to solve problems HCOs should have prevented in the first place.

Anyone would do his job if there were a war on. Well, I've got news for you. There is. And unless you see that clearing gets routine in HGCs, and good auditors get produced by Academies, not just you, but the whole human race will have lost that war.

We win if HCO does its job. We win if we turn out releases and clears routinely. We lose if any of the statements made in the fictitious letter above remain long true and remain unsolved in HCOs.

Any part of that text is solved by HIGH TECHNICAL SERVICE.

P.S. Thank God, I've never received anything like these letters. But I do receive lines in them. L.R.H.