THE subject of this week's Business cover story is one on which TIME's readers are all thoroughly knowledgeable and even expert: inefficiency. Practically everyone has his own list of horror stories about malfunctioning equipment, poor repairmanship, delays at airports, ill-natured salespeople and savage cab drivers. TIME's editors and correspondents are not only subject to this malaise but, being in the business of communications, are particularly vulnerable to it. In reporting and writing this week's cover, the staff encountered almost supernatural attempts to jam, delay and even halt its efforts to get a story to press.

Initial queries to correspondents, an operation that we have managed to streamline fairly well over the years, mysteriously disappeared or arrived so garbled as to be unintelligible. One Teletype machine actually developed a lisp. Clarifications were quickly sent out, prompting Boston Correspondent Ruth Galvin to reply: "Re clarification of clarification: don't apologize. The project is taking a little time because I can't get a dial tone on my telephone, one source is unavailable because his lines are down, and another is tied up with a faulty furnace." After an on-schedule, trouble-free flight into Detroit, another correspondent was imprisoned aboard for 45 minutes because someone forgot to move an exit tunnel to the plane.

Not surprisingly, experiences like these kept correspondents at their typewriters even longer than usual. Our bureau chief in Chicago ended 43 pages of copy with the note: "Everyone here chipped in. The only problem was: our best sources would have been our wives, but none of them were speaking to any of us after the late nights spent on the inefficiency story." Contributing Editor George Church, who wrote the cover story, locked himself in his office with a 10 1/2-in. pile of reports from the field. Aware of the impossibility of remembering it all, he quickly filled a notebook with impressions, possible leads, themes, sequences and questions. Then the notebook disappeared. Researcher Eileen Shields, meanwhile, kept track of Church's files, her own reports, 31 reference and textbooks and mountains of clippings, only by using every square inch of floor space. Senior Editor Marshall Loeb arrived at dawn in his Manhattan hotel room to find his bed unmade since the last occupant. Sleepily, Loeb researched the problem and his bed was made up within the hour. He was back at his desk an hour and 45 minutes later -- fresh, rested, and obviously at peak efficiency.

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