The town of Schagen, North Holland sent a letter to one of their newest residents, inviting them to town hall in order to find out about what bureaucrats can do for them. At this point in time, the answer is so not much because the town sent a letter to a three-month-old baby girl whose diary is pretty much full up for the foreseeable future.

Yes, she is a new resident of Schagen, but why didn’t the town have a good look at the baby’s date of birth before sending this kind of useless correspondence? I’m quite sure that the rest of the country checks these kinds of details first.

In true bureaucratic form, and even though the baby’s parents and the town had a good laugh about the mishap, the bureaucrats managed to blame the newly implemented privacy law (possibly the General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR), saying they could not easily check a date of birth, which I call bullshit on. All newborn children as well as every single resident of the Netherlands must be registered with town hall, making it pretty clear when reading their date of birth who is a baby. The GDPR has enough articles about when to use personal data and when not to.

After the father posted the invitation for his daughter on Facebook, people commented that they too had received weird letters from their town: an eight-year-old boy was invited to come and talk about real estate law.

A few years back, the Dutch tax office, a very different breed of bureaucrats,
pestered a nine-year-old for not filing a return when of course they didn’t have to.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl, Photo of baby booties by Winam, some rights reserved)