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

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

#241

Post by charles_f »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #33

Karen woke up this morning in her run down, rented flat. She briefly looks at the collections letter that showed up yesterday due to an unaffordable repair she had to pay for on her credit card. Another letter from her ex-partner's lawyer. As she rushes out the door (she spilled coffee on her one nice sweater, her favorite) her mom flashes through her mind... "What about mum?". She arrives at the office. It is an opp…

While I do agree generally, there are a couple things to note

1. Author was made to pay for the bureaucracy and a rigid rule, and found a way to revert that. Now Karen pays the price for the bureaucracy. In the end Author made it a 0 sum game while there was not necessarily a need... and yet fair is fair, he was entered in the game without asking, and he played it.

2. > She has no power, absolutely no power

I doubt if this is true. In the end she said "fine we'll mark the file as updated" while having received only partially what Author sent. This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.

In the end I'm not sure if it was worth making someone else suffer, there was probably that 2 pages file that they needed to send, which would have been enough to send everyone on their merry way. Beyond just creating suffering to someone else, that could have very well ended with "fine, we'll review those 500 pages, I'm not sure if we can do that by the deadline".

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

#242

Post by tryauuum »

looperhacks wrote: post #50

I know it's fiction - but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author. The spam should go to the person in charge, not the person who is forced to deal with this every day

fascinating. And who is that mythical person in charge

I tried to delete my account on GitHub. I could not. The gdpr compliance email address they provide happily accepts emails but my account is still there, after more than 3 months.

Why am I writing this here? To show you an example of being powerless to the system. The only things I can do is things you can call "petty", like wearing a "Microsoft employees deserve Gulag" t-shirt. Since I tried many other options and failed multiple times

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

#243

Post by johnnyanmac »

trinsic2 wrote: post #203
noirscape wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken from the pretty obvious position of never having to have worked a low-wage people facing job. 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 worthle…

Being paid a low wage doesn't give you a right to mistreat people because of you conditions. There are no justified resentments

I'd say that is likewise for treating your customer as a nuisance instead of taking the time to explain the circumstance.

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

#244

Post by masklinn »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #220
watwut wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not. And also, they are not supposed to use their intuitive ideas about what is and what is not dangerous use of software. When they do use their intuitive ideas, hacks happen. Karen here doing what she was told and accepting only formats that her organization security team told her to do is Karen doing the correct thing…

>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not. 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 ar…

> 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.

That’s a hilarious fantasy you have here.

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

#245

Post by bmurphy1976 »

ryandrake wrote: post #208
Etherlord87 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree. You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended. I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [tra…

> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure. Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing. These huge businesses and huge governments are t…

Eh, it has an impact. It's not always obvious but it adds up over time. Use your analogy of choice: slowly building up pressure until it boils over or a small pebble starting an avalanche or whatever works for you.

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.

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

#246

Post by ryandrake »

philipallstar wrote: post #221
ryandrake wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure. Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing. These huge businesses and huge governments are t…

> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing. 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.

That's pretty vague. I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but OK.

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

#247

Post by squigz »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #161

People are judging OP and/or judging Karen. A lot is being lost in translation. When you get a certain drone with a certain way of speaking down to you ("this is the system obviously, you faceless person who is just as dumb as all the other faceless people"), then it's infuriating and I can see why OP went to bureaucratic war. At the same time, give the drone a break. She's doing what she's been trained to do, in the…

Considering the sentiments usually expressed on HN, it's kind of shocking the ratio of people judging the people vs those judging the system.

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

#248

Post by adzm »

password4321 wrote: post #227
Synthetic7346 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an outdated requirement? What's the attack surface of an email vs fax? Unless they ban phones at the office, someone could just take a photo of the documents the patient faxed or mailed them

> What's the attack surface of an email vs fax? I believe the primary concern has been while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.

Additionally the storage of email was cited as a concern, making mass data breaches much simpler.

Note that there is a HIPAA approved email service called Direct, as in Direct Messaging / Direct Exchange / Direct Connect.

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

#249

Post by scottlamb »

looperhacks wrote: post #50

I know it's fiction - but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author. The spam should go to the person in charge, not the person who is forced to deal with this every day

> I know it's fiction

Or semi-fiction? The author is actually blind and tagged it nonfiction, but I suspect some embellishment.

> but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author.

When I'm frustrated talking with an agent of a big organization, I try to remember they probably didn't set the policy. But I also expect them to express some empathy for how I'm negatively affected by that policy. The author/protagonist, accurately or not, felt the opposite from "Karen from compliance". In their shoes, I wouldn't feel much empathy for Karen in return.

> The spam should go to the person in charge

I also expect the agent to have a closer relationship with "the person in charge" than I do (none whatsoever). If I mention the policy is absurd, they could at least make some effort to pass that along to their manager.

Also, sending the information to the agent is necessary compliance, even if the volume is malicious.

> not the person who is forced to deal with this every day

Maybe they feeling a bit of the pain themselves might make them more likely to speak up. If this becomes a miserable job that no one will stay in, that might provoke a change.

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

#250

Post by johnnyanmac »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #104
mothballed wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how it's handled from my limited dealings with the machine. Literally no one gives a shit if you make their job 'harder.' They have an endless treadmill of things to do. Whether it's your 500 page fax or 500 people with a 1 page fax is of no consequence to them. They will work at the same pace either way. In fact their boss might like it because they can try to use it to argue for more headcount which…

> Literally no one gives a shit if you make their job 'harder.' They have an endless treadmill of things to do. Whether it's your 500 page fax or 500 people with a 1 page fax is of no consequence to them. They will work at the same pace either way. 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 tryin…

They were fucked over already. I can't speak for the but I'd see this as a small bit of retribution.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong here, but: fax's have a timestamp on them, right? If you can confirm that it was sent before a deadline, they'd accept it, right? It's clear in this story that Karen ditn need to read all 500 pages to mark the author on.

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