What we'd be fascinated to know, however, is exactly how they propose to identify those bureaucratic types who are excess to requirements. Do they come to work in bowler hats? Or do you nail them in an interview with some clever questioning? "Tell me Brown. Let's be really frank. You've always secretly LIKED Sir Humphrey Appleby. Haven't you? Hmmnn?"

And how did they train them? "Look here, young Smithers. We've got an important job for you. We've discovered that many of our middle and senior managers have been making decisions far too quickly. We want you to go in and slow them down. We don't care how you do it. Write some more memos. Invent new forms to fill in. Whatever it takes, Smithers. This reckless speed must be stopped. It's up to you."

We love the idea that there's been some sort of conspiracy within the ranks of Telstra to appoint front-line staff to provide better service to their customers, and immediately appoint others to stop them doing so.

In fact that seems to be precisely what has happened in Telstra Wholesale, with the report on Whirlpool this week that Telstra is obstructing the migration of customers from Telstra DSLAMs to competing DSLAMs that offer faster speeds and lower prices. There must be lots of those bureaucrats in that department, because they're only agreeing to tackle 100 of them at a time, and they're taking EIGHT WEEKS to do each of them.

Telstra claims the process isn't easy because it involves disconnecting a physical wire from its DSLAM and connecting it to the competitor's DSLAM. "It is a relatively complex exercise requiring close cooperation and deployment of resources as technicians need to physically disconnect and reconnect individual lines", Telstra Wholesale told Whirlpool.

Eight weeks! To disconnect and connect a wire. They're so damned inefficient, Telstra's saving a fortune delaying the exit of frustrated customers. We think we can help Michael Herskope with his job. Start the interviewing process at Telstra Wholesale. You'll get much less bureaucracy if you let the efficiency architects loose on that mob. As long as you're quite sure, of course, that "a more efficient environment" is what you're really after.