RUSSIA: Wynken, Bylinkin & Nod

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All a good bureaucrat needs to be happy is a bureau—any bureau. Not understanding this universal law of nature, Moscow s Komsomolskaya Pravda waxed wroth last week at a bureaucrat named Bylinkin who could just as well have worked in Omsk, Tomsk or Washington.

Bylinkin had a job in the Oblast Komsomol Committee (regional youth organization). Recently he got in the wrong office, sat down at a telephone and worked for three days without realizing that he was in the wrong place. When his error was finally discovered, he said it had occurred to him that there were lots of new faces around—but on thinking it over he smugly decided that everyone else in the organization had been fired overnight.

Observed Komsomolskaya Pravda indignantly: "The worst part of the whole affair is that, having spent three days in a different institution, Bylinkin did not notice any difference in the nature of the work of two such different organizations as an Oblast Komsomol Committee and an Oblast Agricultural Committee."