Tap, Tap, Tap, Bloop, Gone.

So here's an interesting approach to merchandising and pricing your products. Imagine, if you will, that you have set up a company to build sports cars, and you reckon your can sell 50 in the first year. Or maybe, closer to home, you have invented some fabulous new piece of software that you're convinced will sweep the world off its feet and find a home on every desktop and server out there (yes, when I was a lot younger I started out like that as well...). Anyway, after a year, you discover that you are only selling half what you budgeted for, and so you're losing money. What do you do?

Well, you could decide to trim your costs to get back on budget. Or you could redouble your efforts in selling the cars/programs/whatever-it-is-you-do to reach your initial target. Or you might instead consider improving the product so it is easier to sell, making up the gap that way. It's a fair bet that one of these approaches - or, more likely, a combination - will solve the embarrassing "hole in the finances" problem...? Or, maybe, instead of any of these, how about just doubling the price?

If that sounds like a daft idea, and may in fact result in reduced sales, you obviously aren't familiar with the way that Government departments tackle this kind of not-unheard-of problem. After all, they are a monopoly in many areas of public service and provision, such as the people who look after registering land ownership or issuing passports. Here in our little Communist corner of the People's Republic of Europe, the Land Registry and the Passport Office have both announced that, because people can't afford to buy houses or go on holiday any more, these two offices are both running over budget. It seems that the income from the fees they charge has dropped dramatically during the recession.

In fact, one of my wife's friends works in the local Land Registry office and she's regularly been regaling us with tales of how they have nothing to do - and are having to look busy by reorganizing the filing system, re-sharpening their pencils every hour, and moving everything from one room to another and back again. She was worried that she'd be made redundant, but that's not the way they do things. Instead, they just put their price up for each registration. And no messing about with 5% increases here, add another 75% on instead.

And then there's passports. Or, as they have now become, "combined identity and travel documents". Not only have they doubled the price, but it seems that the Government doesn't know enough about us already and now they need to put every detail on some database that they can then sell to make some extra money. Of course, it will be really useful in reducing crime and terrorism, and make us all feel safer because we'll have an extra plastic card that we can wave around to prove who we are. Maybe they'll be able to do all the fancy things you see on these TV forensics programs as well, like identify people from the perfume or aftershave they wear, or by the color of their socks. I watch C.S.I. so I know about these things.

In fact, my favorite one was where they were at some big trucking company office where there was a huge map showing lots of red dots where all the trucks were wandering around the roads of the state. A pal of mine has been involved in this kind of project for a local council, so I know it can be done. Though I seem to remember they only did snow ploughs and grass cutting machines, so it was a bit less exciting. My theory is that they could afford only a limited number of geo-location devices, and they figured they wouldn't be doing much grass cutting in the snow.

But I'm wandering off topic. So, as we watched these trucks on the big screen blinking their way around the map, the C.S.I. people started firing questions. "Can you remove all the ones where the driver never goes on route 17?" Three taps on the keyboard, a satisfying bloopy noise, and some of the red dots flash and then fade away. "Now remove all the ones where the truck was off the road last Tuesday". Click, click, click, bloop, gone. "How about all of the trucks with a dent in the passenger door?" Tap, tap, tap, bloop, gone. "Now remove all the ones where the driver has never had whooping cough". Well, you get this picture... after a few more iterations there's only a single red blinking light left, so that must be the murderer!

But I still can't figure why, when you want to search some incredibly huge database of fingerprints, the system decides to make the most of its processing capabilities by retrieving all the ones that don't match and drawing a picture of them on the screen. Still, at least when it does find the right one, it flashes in a very attractive manner and all of the information you could possibly want scrolls across the screen. I wonder if they use an HTML Marquee tag. And our police will soon be able to do the same after we've all been photographed, iris-scanned, and fingerprinted like criminals for our new "combined identity and travel documents".

That is, of course, if they actually get the stuff into the database with some semblance of approximate accuracy (supposedly most of the Government databases have at least 10% errors, and the driver and vehicle one has nearer to 20% errors). I even read this week that they've still not got a system that's supposed to transfer court records to the police national database working because "some of the information is too complicated". It was supposed to be up and running three years ago, and they've already spent on it, according to my rough calculations, a sum of money equal to the entire tax take from our village for the next 75 years. I can't imagine how us people that live in the real world (and obviously only have to work with simple information) would get a way with that - even by doubling the price.