Adam Ries

Adam Ries has found out the hard way. There is just no way that you can get free from the TV licensing people. Doesn't matter where you hide or how hard you try to do so.

Even if you've been dead 450 years, they'll still get you.

A German mathematician who died 450 years ago has been sent a letter demanding that he pay long-overdue television license fees, residents at his former address said on Wednesday.

Germany's GEZ broadcast fee collection office sent the bill to the last home address of Adam Ries, an algebra expert who bought the house in 1525. A club in his honor was set up at the property four centuries later.

"We received a letter saying 'To Mr Adam Ries' on it, with the request to pay his television and radio fees," said Annegret Muench, who now heads the club.

Muench returned the letter to the GEZ with a note explaining the request had come too late because Ries had died in 1559, centuries before the invention of television and radio. She nonetheless received a reminder a few weeks later.

Even when someone explains that you have been in your grave for 450 years, they'll still keep coming after you.

I wonder, should we start talking about Vampire bureaucracies, the undead who suck the money out of you? Or zombie bureaucracies, the undead who want to eat your brains?