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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

#351

Post by ryandrake »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #329
bitwank wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It’s like thinking you can overthrow the government by littering. It’s just being lame. If you’re going to be lame to other people, don’t gloat about your lameness online. “If everybody littered, they’d have to do something about it!”

You kind of missed my point but that's OK. You can agree with or disagree with the action OP took, I'm not making a judgement call on that. What I'm responding to the the notion that "no action you can take matters." Specifically this: >Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations. I just don't believe that. Small actions do matter and are nec…

What's missing is coordination. Coordinated individuals taking actions together can change things. But just relying on individuals stochastically, randomly acting doesn't work. You can't random-walk your way to political change, even if a lot of people are random-walking in one direction.

Worker rights didn't just spontaneously appear because enough people wanted them. They came about through organizing, coordinating and leading. Same for Women's suffrage, Civil rights, gay rights...

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

#352

Post by kstrauser »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #340
kstrauser wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a current requirement. (Source: I'm adjacent to a doctor's office.) Two big advantages of faxes are that 1) they're point-to-point, and 2) there's zero caching between the sender and receiver. If everyone had a fax machine such that you'd commonly get a working fax receiver if you mis-entered the recipient's number, then #1 wouldn't be such a big deal. But in reality, if you enter a fax number, and the other end…

> I guess the equivalent would be if I could ask you to send a PDF to my specific IPv6 address, and you could peer-to-peer shoot it directly to me. That's not exactly complicated if either party owns a web server. Which - last I checked - the government has. Just give the person who needs to send the sensitive documents a short link like uploaddocuments.gov, have that page ask for some basic identifying info, and hav…

That’s kinda true, but adds a few steps over cmd-P “print to fax”, paste in a phone number, done. And when done, the fax workflow has been tested and approved in courts. It’s a known entity.

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.

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

#353

Post by bigbuppo »

kstrauser wrote: post #271
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

It's a current requirement. (Source: I'm adjacent to a doctor's office.) Two big advantages of faxes are that 1) they're point-to-point, and 2) there's zero caching between the sender and receiver. If everyone had a fax machine such that you'd commonly get a working fax receiver if you mis-entered the recipient's number, then #1 wouldn't be such a big deal. But in reality, if you enter a fax number, and the other end…

That's a very 1993 understanding of telecommunications.

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

#354

Post by UltraSane »

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…

That is war.

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

#355

Post by TeMPOraL »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #250
TeMPOraL wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Per the story, the protagonist DoSed the fax machine. Fax machines are dumb, and employees often don't know how to operate them outside of the most common flow.

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

#356

Post by GlenTheMachine »

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.

“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally”

As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…

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

#357

Post by UltraSane »

kstrauser wrote: post #271
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

It's a current requirement. (Source: I'm adjacent to a doctor's office.) Two big advantages of faxes are that 1) they're point-to-point, and 2) there's zero caching between the sender and receiver. If everyone had a fax machine such that you'd commonly get a working fax receiver if you mis-entered the recipient's number, then #1 wouldn't be such a big deal. But in reality, if you enter a fax number, and the other end…

Most faxes today are between two fax over the Internet services and so are completely pointless.

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

#358

Post by mrguyorama »

stockresearcher wrote: post #179

The ending is a little hard to believe. My sister has a job somewhat like this for a school system. Multiply the number of working hours by the number of workers, divide by the number of active cases and the number of hours each case takes to resolve. The answer is that a large number of cases will not be done by their deadlines. If someone wanted to send her a 500 page fax, she’s just going to shrug and work on some…

It's very likely, even in some smaller local governments, that the "Fax" doesn't do any printing at all. Digital faxing has been a staple of bureaucracy for decades.

So it doesn't inconvenience the "Karen" who is supposedly so evil for (checks notes) following the laws or rules that were implemented by people who were voted into their position.

Unlike in the private sector, public sector employees are often literally constrained by the law. You can personally end up in court if you try to help someone bypass a law. Plenty of government employees DO still end up bending rules.

Karen has zero power. If she did, she wouldn't be talking to assholes on the phone all day every day.

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

#359

Post by BloondAndDoom »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #356
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.

“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally” As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basic…

This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude

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

#360

Post by axus »

snk wrote: post #315
axus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens. The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online ( https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm ), which I found after following the link in…

A couple of possibilities spring to mind. Likelier that Karen lied, but maybe the 512 page fax changed the system.

The post dated March 25 2026 says "This week, I received The Letter."

More likely he had a fun idea and ran with it to illustrate other problems he's had.

I can say from personal experience that the people on the phone for US Social Security are enforcing inhumane policies. A relative with a speech impediment and in serious pain who was unable to travel to the office for an interview had to be ready for a phone call. If the phone wasn't answered after four rings, have to reschedule a phone call. When the phone call arrived, they had to answer questions personally without assistance or "coaching". The caller couldn't understand the relative due to the speech impediment, and the relative was in distress and having difficulty understanding the questions. But we weren't supposed to help.

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