God-damn. That could, conceivably, have actually been a decent joke if the prose painfully manoeuvring it into position didn't resemble a railroad switcher heaving heavy freight cars around a yard. Pat has admitted that he's trying to sound like Douglas Adams, but Pat's problem (well, let's face it, one of Pat's many, many problems) is that the story he's trying to tell is too serious for the kind of Pythonesque/Terry Gilliam tone that a joke like that needs to sit in. Pat's sci-fi is too "hard" and it's trying to tell a serious space story as well as being dumb, rather than something like HTGTTG which is a wacky adventure story whose only real purpose is to form a framework to attach jokes to.
That's not the only way he hasn't paid enough attention to Douglas Adams. That joke either needs to be told by the narrator or be nested in much snappier dialogue that's not so fucking wordy. I'm no Douglas Adams (no-one is), but how about:
---
"Name?" asked Pelax. Her shoulders slumped with the weight of bureaucratic inevitability.
"Firstname Lastname" she mumbled, staring at the floor.
The creature raised three of its eyebrows.
"Firstname," it sighed, "Lastname?"
"Data entry error," she quietly informed the linoleum. She had been assured back on Porklinson Station that it would be corrected in due course. That really was a long time ago, though. And the way that assurance had been delivered between peals of laughter wasn't even all that encouraging at the time.
The creature paused, then passed her documents into the authenticator.
"I see. Well you're the only human here so nobody is likely to get confused." Pelax peered over his office balcony at the milling throng below. "No more confused than normal, at any rate."
