Never Meta Form I Don't Like

Yesterday's story on https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71146-0.html AT&T's legal response to Wired News's attempt to get the judge overseeing the EFF lawsuit against the telecom giant for allegedly helping the government create an architecture of surveillance has got me in an introspective mood.

27B Stroke 6 as many of you know is a reference to Terry Gilliam's http://www.trond.com/brazil/ Brazil, a classic dystopian movie which, to its ever lasting credit, is as Kafka-esque as it is Orwellian.

27b Stroke 6 refers to a form needed by Central Services technicians (one played by Bob Costas) before they can do any work on the ducts that power the heating and cooling systems of the city's hilariously buggy high-tech apartments.

A reader I'll call Mike wrote expressing his pleasure with the name and suggesting that one company might actually be using a 27B Stroke 6 to this day.

When I worked for a bureaucratic airline in the UK where you needed at least 6 jobs on the go at once to keep busy waiting for others to do their bit."

"Keeping track of them became a nightmare so I came up with my own form to keep track of each job, who had it, when and what I was waiting for. I called it a 27B/6.

Once I became good at chasing down people who had forgotten they were working on things and countered with an accusation that I still hadn't done something with a rummage through my out-tray and the information that it was placed on their desk at 12:14 on a certain date, these forms caught on and 27B/6 became part of the department's language.
It slowly dawned on me that nobody had actually heard of a 27B/6, least of all the managers and so it became an in-joke between myself and a few of the later arrivals whose first day started with:
"Here, you might find these useful."
"A 27B/6? You're joking right?"
"No, why?"
"Er...where did you get these 27B/6s?"
"Mike made them over there."

I would be greeted by new arrivals in the know when a face appeared over my cubicle and someone gave me the thumbs up "Nice one Mike!".

The last I heard, they're still using them to this day.