On Niue, They Fill In

No Accounting for Tastes—

On Niue, They Fill In Forms For Fun

By a Staff Writer

One of the curses of modern civilisation is form-filling. You fill in a form when you want a passport, when you want a visa, when you don’t want to pay your income tax but have to, when you buy something on the never-never, and even when you want a railway pass.

MODERN man spends thousands of hours of his life filling in forms—providing officialdom and others with such irrelevant in formation as his mother’s maiden name, his father’s birthplace and the ages of his children (if any).

Most modern men would rather carry bricks than fill in forms.

And most modern officials get a seemingly fiendish pleasure out of making them do it.

But this is not the case at Niue.

Over there, the people fill in forms because they like it. And official dom, which doesn’t like it, is do ing its best to stop the people from doing it!

This topsy-turvy, and possibly unique, situation in Niue was revealed in a recent issue of the Niue Newsletter, in a public notice signed by the postmaster.

The postmaster said that forms were being filled in at the post office “for no legitimate purpose” and were being scattered in the post office writing cubicles.

“Please do not indulge your self in the privilege of filling in forms for no reason at all,” he begged his readers. "This be haviour in itself shows lack of mentality.”

The postmaster also pleaded with the public to take better care of the post office writing cubicles.

“I regret to report,” he said,

“that the use of these cubicles has been abused. Ink has been carelessly splashed on to the glass panels, gum has been applied to the panels, ink has been splashed on the writing platform, used chewing gum is deposited on the ledges, and a host of rubbish, in cluding sweets wrappings, is left in the cubicles. Furthermore, pens seem to develop legs and walk off.”

The postmaster said that if the pens were fastened with a bit of string, this would “only make the challenge to walk off even more irresistible.”

He therefore made it clear that the post office would not put temptation in the way of the leg sprouting pens. But if anyone should put a post office pen in his bag “by mistake,” the post master urged them to “please bring it back.”

“We all make mistakes,” he

added sportingly.

The postmaster was equally sporting on the question of spilled ink. “If you accidentally spill an ink-well,” he said, “ask for a cloth to clean it, or tell us to clean it for you.”

It’s a topsy-turvy world at Niue all right. Imagine anybody being game enough to tell an official at the Sydney GPO to clean up a spilled ink-well!