Ah, but I could enter a flight plan at the old FDIO and do the same thing! The difference was that the strips could be used as evidence. And they were.
I've had much the same experience with military units that you seem to have had-- If only I had had the common sense to include them in the joke ahead of time, there'd probably have been a lot less pain...
Ah yes, Jerricho... strip holder engineering. I could build remarkable structures, but could never balance one on my nose no matter which way I turned it (them).
The silly things were useful in so many ways... one afternoon we got into an argument about whether a particular application of logic was valid. It was the hypothetical where you've got three doors to select from. Behind two of them are lumps of coal, and behind the third one is a new headset or a car or a great deal of money or something else you'd find useful (and you don't like coal). So, you select one of the three doors. The door you selected remains closed, but one of the other two doors is opened to reveal a lump of coal. You are given a choice: stick with the door you originally selected, or switch to the other door which has not yet been opened.
The traditional logic (which seems counter-intuitive) is that you should switch to the other unopened door, because when you originally selected your door you had a one in three chance of being right, whereas if you select the other closed door now you'll have a 50/50 chance of being right. Some people thought this was nuts and others believed it to be as predictable as gravity. So we found three perfectly-matched strip holders. In two of them we put strips marked "coal," and in the third we marked the strip "car." Then we turned them face-down and spent hours doing empirical research. The results were completely convincing, owing largely to the fact that there was just no way to cheat with the strip holders. Of course we could have done it another way (in other words, it admittedly didn’t have enough to do with strips to reasonably shoe-horn it into a thread like this), but it was just so freaking elegant with the strip holders.
Which puts me in mind of the night that a broken strip printer, a wicked thunderstorm, a flight of four (4) RF4Cs, the physics of tangential velocity, and an utter and complete failure of circular polarization joined forces with fate and my own ineptitude to create a situation wherein my aged mother called me from 40 miles away from the airport and asked, "just what the hell was that that just went by my house?" But in that this is a thread unrelated to such matters, it’ll wait.
Dave
If anybody ever opens a pub for old ATCOs I want to be the guy by the window with the dog.