On Elven Bureaucracy

It would be reasonable to suppose that a people who routinely live ten centuries would excel at keeping records. They do, and the excellence is not always beneficial. An Elven municipal office once rejected my application for access to a burial register because a supporting document had been filed under an obsolete naming convention adopted two hundred and fourteen years earlier. The clerk remembered the convention personally. He also remembered the clerk who had introduced it, whom he disliked, and this did not accelerate matters.