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| Le chat bureaucrate se tourne les pouces // The cat bureaucrat is twiddling his thumbs |
After a few soul-destroying experiences with Spanish bureaucracy I felt a sudden urge to draw a pic dedicated to this excellent subgroup of the population — governmental workers in public admin. Those of you who don't know anything about it — those are guys and gals who get a contract for life and are practically impossible to get rid of. I will stop here because the rant could be endless.
Anyway, some goodish while ago a symbol of such a person in Russia was a specific item of clothing — black oversleeve (protège-manche in French), protecting the sleeves, mostly in the elbow areas, from being worn out.
Short research by Kirill showed that at least in Germany the oversleeves have a similar connotation. Not sure about France, but we are not trying to be accurate here, just following the string of associations.
One of the things that public servants can't be fired for is doing nothing, or, of course, twiddling their thumbs. To our delight, the expression proved to exist in French too.
Of course, there are at least two incongruencies in the pic above. First, the cat doesn't have elbows, so there is little to protect. Second, he doesn't have thumbs either, so there is nothing to twiddle.
Three, actually. The cat is way too cute to be a bureaucrat in the first place.
