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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

#341

Post by fluidcruft »

kerblang wrote: post #164

Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules. Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office th…

It's also funny because at work our fax machines don't print unless we go over and print it. The machine just converts the fax to PDF.

This is an indictment of email more than anything.

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

#342

Post by nojvek »

Oh boy.

I’m dealing with IRS right now to get an EIN for an LLC. They won’t give an EIN over online form. Must be faxed or physically mailed.

They say 3-5 days. Been weeks. I pay $5/week to hold onto a fax number.

So Trump spending hundreds of billions on blowing up kids’ schools in Iran and cutting funding from IRS.

Why does it take weeks to start a business in 2026 and get a bank account.

Just absurd.

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

#343

Post by autoexec »

nickff wrote: post #324
tyingq wrote: post #18

Sounds like it's not real but... It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally, rather than the rules and constraints that employee is forced to use. Probably fair to comment on the interaction, whether the person was rude, and so on. But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing.

I've heard this justification many times, but it's highly questionable. Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis; is this morally justifiable? What if their 'job description' does not include 'murder', but they do indeed have to murder an innocent person each month because of the 'rules and constrai…

> Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis;

Several large corporations really are guilty of murdering innocent people on a regular basis. Even still, if you find a low wage worker in that company's mail room and beat the shit out of them to make yourself feel better it's you who are the asshole, and it does nothing to stop the killing.

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

#344

Post by GlenTheMachine »

As a government employee, enmeshed in the bureaucracy:

This is the way.

The problem is that it took Karen zero effort to say “we only accept fax”. She doesn’t care about how much effort it takes you you — in fact, as implied, it taking you a tremendous amount of effort actually reduces her effort. In order to make a dent, you have to figure out a way for the idiotic policy to impact the person making and/or enforcing it. That’s the only way it ever changes.

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

#345

Post by egorfine »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #61
tyingq wrote: post #18

Sounds like it's not real but... It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally, rather than the rules and constraints that employee is forced to use. Probably fair to comment on the interaction, whether the person was rude, and so on. But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing.

Yeah, this anger is entirely misplaced. I don't think this woman is happy to have to enforce this idiotic law and listen to angry people all day long. It's the politicians that people like us elected because they promised to cut wasteful spending, so now blind people have to prove they're still blind once a year. We did that to them.

> I don't think this woman is happy to have to enforce this idiotic law

But this is exactly what she chooses to do every morning.

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

#346

Post by robflynn »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #287
robflynn wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They attacked a fax machine, I don't think it has feelings. The woman will get over her frustration at seeing it print for two hours.

I also been on the customer service side and it's really annoying getting angry persona after angry person trying to push their frustrations on you for something you have no control.

Oh, me too. I started out as tech support for a dial up ISP in the 90s. It was rough. I am always polite to customer service. I just feel like it wasn't the lady that was attacked so much as it was the fax machine, the policy, the institution. She had some frustration, but it sounds like he was even polite to her, Didn't yell, didn't call her names or anything. He just opted for malicious compliance.

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.

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

#347

Post by xattt »

ctoth wrote: post #339

I'm blind. This guy is not fighting the system. He's being a jerk to a call center worker and writing fan fiction about her suffering in public. Not a good look.

Having worked in a similar field, providing historic documentation when it’s not necessary usually prolongs the process for the client. This is because the reviewer now has to sort through all these files to make sure new contradictory info isn’t lost in between.

Also, large firms will typically digitize directly into a document management system. It would be no more than 5-15 minutes at most for an experienced reviewer to flip through 500 PDF pages to find current supporting evidence of a medical disability.

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

#348

Post by ryandrake »

theK wrote: post #301
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…

So what is the argument here? That it is irrelevant because there is no critical mass? Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?

The French Revolution didn't just happen spontaneously from individuals acting individually. You need leadership and coordinated action to change things. A small number of individuals acting individually, yet pushing in the same direction, will never move a needle.

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

#349

Post by johnnyanmac »

masklinn wrote: post #334
johnnyanmac wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm open to options. Not doomerism "the system can't be fixed" mentality. I don't like to think of myself as combative. Ideally we get listened to in council and they properly pull what strings are needed to help. But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air. Being a nuisance (or l…

> But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air. So your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to. Why, then, are you advocating for harassing front-line low-level employees? Go for the people w…

>your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.

I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee. It can be the custome, it can be a malicious actor. It can be the federal or state government. But it has to come from outside or up top.

I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything"

>Go for the people who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.

If you've seen local policy these days... Yeah, not really. LA just had a new Metro line approved despite the mayor's attempts to delay the vote. Policy isn't working with us.

I won't say escalation doesnt work, but I haven't seen it pulled off. Wait queues for help is already so long, so asking more time of the customer might not be feasible. It's already inefficient enough that we need go use Synchronous calls to to do all these duties.

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

#350

Post by DrammBA »

maweaver wrote: post #293
RobotToaster wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are curable disabilities. True, but it should be obvious in 99% of cases if a condition is lifelong. >And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology. Very rarely tbh. I can't think of a single lifelong condition that was cured in the last decade. Even then it should be trivial to only review cases when a cure is available, by searching the database for people with that condition.

Relevant to this story, laser eye surgery was developed in the late 80s/early 90s and can improve sight to the level that some who were legally blind no longer are.

> Relevant to this story

Is it? The Author mentions he has degenerated optical nerves from birth, I don't think laser fixes that.

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