The German TV licensing agency has been missing some important details.

In October, they threatened the German poet Friedrich Schiller with legal action if he failed to pay his 17 euro TV license for the month. Sadly, Mr. Schiller was unable to settle his account, as he had been deceased since May 1805.

Following up on this questionable effort, the agency solicited television and radio dues from a cat, a beagle, and a mathematician by the name of Adam Ries, who passed away in 1559. Mr. Ries expressed bewilderment with the bill, as he had been dead for hundreds of years before either technology was invented. The cat and beagle declined to comment.

You might speculate that, in the throes of the economic crisis, their board figured this unusual fundraising scheme was worth a try.

The article in the Telegraph quotes the agency’s explanation: “We have to deal with such a huge amount of data,” the spokesperson says, “that something like this can happen.”

When you have such an overwhelming volume of information to process that one person can only handle a tiny fraction of it at a time, how can you possibly catch every obvious detail? How can you pay attention to any one person enough to know who they are?

If you have too much information to fit in one human brain, you’re bound to ask a few famous dead people for money.

It’s easy to laugh at the German licensing agency; we expect large bureaucracies to experience a database hiccup now and then. My question: how often do individual people do this? Like kids that insist on wearing adult-size shoes, we try on a daily basis to carry around more information than we can actually fit in our brains. How often do we lose touch with who people are as a result? How often do we miss the obvious details of other people’s lives, and end up, as far as they’re concerned, back in 1559?

How many times, in sifting through mounds of overwhelming thoughts, have you billed Adam Ries?