The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

This cannot be the best word…

I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago I changed the address on my car but didn't receive the documentation and didn't realise for a few months. Then I realised the tax was due and I hadn't had a reminder or this paperwork - one of which is needed to tax it.

I phoned them and they said I need to pay for the new documentation because I had a time limit to report it undelivered. Fine, that's my fault, but I need to tax it now otherwise I'll get fined, and I have no way to do it. I asked her how to do it and she said there is "no way" she can tax it over the phone I need to wait for the documentation. I told her I'll get fined and she said there is no way to tax it over the phone unless I have the VIN number which I won't have. Sorry, there's nothing she can do.

I told her I actually have the VIN number to hand, does she want me to read it for her? Suddenly she didn't need it and just needed card details. The impossible bureaucratic process was suddenly gone now. She just hadn't wanted to help.

I'm baffled that people in this thread are acting like almost everyone hasn't had a similar experience at one time or another.

I've worked in a variety of places. Public sector, banks, places with higher and lower levels of bureaucracy. As everyone else, I've also been on the receiving end of dealing with bureaucracy. There seems to be a big divide in how long people have been working at places like that - up to 1-2 years, or 20+ years, and a big difference in the type of people in those two groups.

Assuming that it's a preconception and not observed is a bizarre assumption.

I phoned them and they said I need to pay for the new documentation because I had a time limit to report it undelivered. Fine, that's my fault, but I need to tax it now otherwise I'll get fined, and I have no way to do it. I asked her how to do it and she said there is "no way" she can tax it over the phone I need to wait for the documentation. I told her I'll get fined and she said there is no way to tax it over the phone unless I have the VIN number which I won't have. Sorry, there's nothing she can do.

I told her I actually have the VIN number to hand, does she want me to read it for her? Suddenly she didn't need it and just needed card details. The impossible bureaucratic process was suddenly gone now. She just hadn't wanted to help.

Was this woman just following the law? Was it the fault of the politicians? Me, as a voter? She had no other choice than refusing to help?

This is the definition of brainwashing. You had a false choice between person A and person B who are mostly the same some 4 years ago, and now _you_ are responsible for every stupid policy they enact.

telnet to the mail server on the relevant port, either ssl, or TLS, or stattls.

You'll know :)

The US government manages a more diverse array of problems (critical, life and death problems) than any other US organization (and probably more than any other org in the world). Amazon has only a tiny fraction of the competence of the US government and is not nearly as reliable. Remember the last time a significant portion of the social security system went down? I can't, but I can remember the last time AWS went down.

When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.

Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.

They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.

Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.

What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.

This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:

1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)

2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)

3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments

I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.

Its so bad that I can't help but think its because the contracts to support government workers are handed out in questionable ways. While I don't think much of the people who work in government offices, I do think they could accept emails if their bosses wanted them to and their contractors provided the tech. They aren't any more or less capable than the dentist's office workers. They just have to work with terrible tech that was clearly chosen for the wrong reasons.

And you are criticizing half the country based on a ideology? These employees are at almost no risk of losing their jobs because someone calls their representative to complain, this is fantasy.

So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.

If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.

You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.

Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.

There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.

If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement.

Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever.

Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't.

I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails.

Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is.

Nobody does!

That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.

The people who pay the most for these systems use them the least, and the people who pay the least for them use them the most.

At best you can have a system where the people paying for it are respected for their contribution (and likewise feel good about it), and the people using it are ever grateful for what their receive (and can shamelessly feel good about it).

But man, have you ever dealt with average humans?

As they should. They're in this for the long run. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Which means all the author did was to fuck over a couple dozen other disabled people trying to navigate the process. Good job.

Were I the reader that donated them that $20, I'd issue a charge back now.

The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.

Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.

See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.

How dare someone take a job that isn’t very nice just to afford a living!

That said, everyone kind of sucks in the situation.

The Karen should have been nicer and shown more compassion instead of hitting the OP with that line about security (and maybe the whole approach should have been considered a bit more, since their requirements make it harder for disabled people to receive the support they need).

And OP perhaps maybe should have filed a complaint or something, maybe contact a news org if they’re feeling wronged, instead of being petty like that. What if someone else doesn’t receive their services in a timely manner over that bullshit? It felt more like feeling triumphant over inconveniencing someone and getting back at them in a sense.

I can’t say I don’t find that sort of thing relatable, but yeah it probably could have been handled better by everyone. I guess what I’m saying is that they shouldn’t have been subjected to the circumstance that lead to them being a jerk, but the choice to be one is on them.

Here's the real situation: the people that pick up the phone when you call them up aren't going to be paid much above minimum wage at all. They have zero institutional power to fix anything. You're yelling at people that, themselves, almost certainly are only barely making enough money to get by either.

It is worthless to yell at these people because they can't fix shit; they don't set policies, they have no power to fix things and all your yelling is going to achieve is at best counterproductive to what you want to get done (since now the front facing employee dislikes you personally and is less inclined to try and help you out) and at worst is going to get you into further trouble when you do need something routine done. (Since now you're on the list of "people that the employees don't want to put any extra effort into since they're jerks".)

There are people that get paid to be the complaints facing entity of the organization, who are paid to withstand whatever shit you can throw at them and who have an ability to fix up whatever you needed in specific. They're not the people that pick up the phone.

What you need to do is channel the inner Karen and ask to speak to the manager. The manager can help you with this sort of thing, they are the ones that can do shit to avoid sustaining the machine, because they have a career they want to grow into and risk actual consequences for pissing people off.

Be polite (but firm; you don't need to be walked over) to the first tier support employees, even if they can't help you. Save the complaints for the manager (who you shouldn't be afraid to ask to speak to either). The managers job is to deal with the real complaints, not the routine stuff that just happens to need a human involved. They are taking a job to be the face of the machine for reasons other than "I literally need a minimum wage job to survive".

I disagree. I'm sorry Karen here needs to bear the brunt, but if this kept up, at some point Karen's boss will take notice, And then it moves up the chain to someone who can affect that policy.

Companies purposefully set us up to communicate bottom-up, so we can either play the game or break the law.

>People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us

No, it'd be a policy maker or CEO who thinks we're in the 90's and that secure email documentation isn't a thing. "We" could suggest so many ways to handle it that would save costs while being more secure. We're not much higher on the totem pole than Karen.

Yet suddenly, we get these incidents and our bosses are suddenly rushing to IT to find a solution. As if 6 months of deliberation wasn't enough.

Yes, but a boss being unable to receive a fax because the machine is "otherwise occupied" may do that.

I don’t think that is true. Rules that you have to use a fax machine are enshrined in outdated laws. No IT professional is going to say to use a fax machine for security.

The same thing is true for a lot of security practices. Our company had silly password rotation policies because of certification requirements, not because our IT team thought it was necessary.

It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.

I don't necessarily agree with the OPs approach. He could have filed a complaint or done any number of things that may have been better. But in the heat of the moment nobody is making perfectly rational decisions.

Regardless, we need to fight back against abusive systems on the big and on the small. We won't always get it right but the act of fighting is what matters.

Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.

I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.

Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?

Do you have a citation for that or is that just an idea of a villain you've invented in your head? Karen doesn't hold any power whatsoever over anyone. Karen is a low level employee who has to answer the phones all day. She doesn't decide who gets benefits or not. She didn't create the Continuing Disability Review. She didn't create the security policy that said they should refuse to open PDF attachments from random people who email them. She doesn't need to "get bitten" any more than you do.

Have you heard of pig butchering? Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers: https://www.wired.com/story/the-red-bull-leaks/.

Immoral assholes can out-immoral you.

The catch is that unless it's some form of care or perhaps fire-fighting, there's a high risk that it'll be pretty nasty stuff. Things like denying people decency, perhaps even life, because they were slow to respond or for once didn't get help filling out some form or whatever. Throwing suffering, poor people out on the streets, and then someone else employed by the state hound them until they're almost invisible.

HR people usually say the same and realise too late that they're not going to be as appreciated as they'd hoped, at least not by the people they initially thought they'd help out.

You have me thinking about old customer service war stories now, I wanted to share one of the more ridiculous ones. A tornado came through the small town and knocked out the utility lines. Being a dial-up ISP our infrastructure was a bit messed up for a few days. Once it was all squared away we had an angry customer call and yell at us about how we were offline for a few days and how unprofessional it was to not let him know that we were going offline. That he wasn't so much mad we were offline but we should have told him so he could have planned around it. He was yelling so much. I finally just said "sir, next time we schedule a tornado I will be sure to let you know." and he accepted the answer and thanked me. People are so odd.

And saying it doesn't is like saying "my one piece of litter won't make the park dirty". Just because you can't see the effect one instance has doesn't mean that it isn't meaningful when added all up.

They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved AND make the legislators aware of the problem more generally. My impression is that agencies are often pretty responsive to these things: nobody wants to be on a senator's bad side.

That's a bit of a stretch saying that someone who enforces the rules around disability for a job is doing bad things for money. These same rules filter out a lot of scammers that if not stoped would mean less money going to the right people.

It's also a low skill low pay job, probably worked by a large percentage of people who are close to the poverty line and just trying to make ends meet to support a family.

I don’t love faxes. This isn’t me saying we should keep them forever. We shouldn’t. Still, there are reasons they’re still widely used for medical stuff today. If CMS or HHS rolled out a new method and told doctor’s offices to start using it if they want to get paid, the industry would switch in a heartbeat. Short of that, any other alternative will take approximately forever.

That's not the issue, not sure why you try to steer discussion that way. The issue is, that's not enough to be an asshole and have some respect or general approval for that.

Every Karen making hell for entire neighborhood has some sad story behind, usually series of them and some are properly fucking horrible and heartbreaking to levels where this article reads like great easy chill life. I wish I was kidding, wife is GP and has to do basic psychiatric work too due to lack of available specialist doctors and the stories she hears almost daily... For example the amount of people who experienced sexual abuse as children with lifelong devastating consequences is fucking horribly high, but most go unreported even to close family so not part of any stats.

To condense - this is not enough as an excuse, however harsh the life can be. Thus don't expect that much sympathies. I'd expect a bit higher empathy levels from folks here.

It's not just the faxing that causes people to act the way Karen (supposedly) acted - it's the anger and maliciousness being directed at them by numerous people, all day, every day, even when they do try to be sympathetic to the fact that the system fucks everyone. But there's only so much empathy one can muster.

(Not to mention the various other factors that push good people out of government, such as working for decades to make the systems better only for them to get worse.)

To be clear, I agree with you to an extent; if instead of being malicious and directing anger at the people doing their best to help, people like the author more calmly expressed their frustration with the system, maybe they can bring it up with their superiors, as you said.

All of it's a mess, and not a single facet of this issue is without blame - not the recipients, not the bureaucrats, not the politicians, and certainly not the voters.

Have you seen how much public sector employees taking calls get paid to be abused all day?

If you want people with limitless wells of compassion, pay better. Public sector jobs generally get to scrape the bottom of the barrel and compete with the local grocery store.