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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

#361

Post by mrguyorama »

scottlamb wrote: post #322
squigz wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good.

> Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good. I don't think the author would have acted this way toward someone who said "sorry, I know it's a burden, I know it's stressful to be at risk of losing these benefits, and I've told that to everyone I can repeatedly." So how much danger is there really that the inconvenien…

>I don't think the author would have acted this way toward someone who said "sorry, I know it's a burden, I know it's stressful to be at risk of losing these benefits, and I've told that to everyone I can repeatedly."

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.

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

#362

Post by wyldfire »

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.

> blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly.

I definitely agree - but if the organization creates pain as an externality, then there's no incentive for them to change. Making them realize the cost of their decisions seems appropriate and just and not-even-abusive. Yelling at the person on the phone is bad and doesn't help anyone. Malicious compliance like this helps motivate them to escalate their concerns to people who can change the policy.

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

#364

Post by apical_dendrite »

UltraSane wrote: post #357
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…

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

Amazingly enough, this is actually not true. Many smaller doctors' offices still have a physical fax machine. I work on automation for certain processes in healthcare and a very large proportion of the faxes we receive come from physical fax machines. You can see artifacts on the fax itself and sometimes the cover letter will have a scribbled note.

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

#365

Post by cvhc »

Well, I'd appreciate Karen is willing to talk and explain whatever inconvenient policies they have. A faceless bureaucracy is even more desperate.

My wife and I had many troubles (delays due to additional security checks, endless request for documents) in visa and all immigration-related applications in the US. We cannot even find a government official to complain. Email inquires all end up with boilerplate responses. Many agencies do not have phone services, and even if some do, you are connected to an unhelpful call center worker who can only provide generic info and have no permissions to discuss your problems. And lawyers told us we could do little because all the procedures are legitimate. We may (and we did once in the past) sue the government but only after an "unreasonable" delay, at which point much harm is already caused.

This week the US consulate emailed me to ask for official documents about a minor past civil suit against me in China, including "a police certificate", for my visa application. Why the heck does the US visa have anything to do with a civil suit, and in which country does a civil suit involve police?

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

#366

Post by apical_dendrite »

kstrauser wrote: post #352
yonatan8070 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 st…

We still deal with doctors who handwrite their progress notes. Fax will be around for a very, very long time.

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

#367

Post by mrguyorama »

pluc wrote: post #23

Whenever I read stories like this about how hard it is for US people to keep getting the little they've been getting I think of people on the other side. It takes an evil compliance to be the Karen in this article. Zero empathy, zero compassion, you're a row in a spreadsheet. If they'd start caring a little and standing up to what is very obviously wrong, the US would be a much different place. Apply that same logic…

Karen is forced to respect the law. The law around benefits is absolutely full of this exact bullshit in the US, because of 50 years of people screeching about "Welfare queens" which was an invented thing.

It doesn't matter what Karen thinks or wants. It doesn't matter if Karen believes the disabled person or not. It doesn't matter if Karen is physically capable of complex thought or not. If Karen breaks the rules for you, you will end up losing your benefits anyway, possibly forced to pay them back, and Karen loses her job.

Public sector employment pays terribly. People don't really do it because they enjoy it.

There is literal law all over that says "This information can't be in an email for privacy reasons". It's not policy, it's law.

Stop harassing low level bureaucrats and learn some damn civics.

Similarly, when I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had zero ability to refund you, to fix a problem, to bend any rule for example to help you with your WIC process, which was utterly miserable. Oh sorry the pamphlet this week says X bread is the only approved one, it doesn't matter that it causes your child GI distress, nobody is allowed to change it.

Vote for people who aren't trying to hurt disabled people and you will have fewer disabled people being hurt. Stop screeching about "Fraud" that doesn't exist if you want it to be easy for people to get the welfare they need.

All attempts to battle fraud will inherently add friction to the process. Find an optimization point that isn't so hostile to human beings.

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

#368

Post by cm11 »

masklinn wrote: post #244
johnnyanmac wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I sorta feel there's as much fantasy on the other side. The situation as is—the concrete one we're discussing here—exists. You're voting for a version where this person doesn't complain through the methods designed for it and instead writes to the CEO or something and has things fixed that way. Or possibly just doesn't complain about being screwed at all.

The system is largely bad. That's mostly agreed by each side. I feel like what you're asking for—to treat others as humans—is right and yet only going in one direction. There's a disagreement between the company and the customer and instead of showing up the company disingenuously gives you an unrelated powerless person to speak to. The expectation is that you shouldn't count them as the company, you count them as a human—and you're supposed to do that _because_ the company underpays them and gives them no power.

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

#370

Post by cdcarter »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #265
raincole wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say there is no compliance hurdles or the benefits are supposed to be easy to get. I said that the author insinuates the woman is actively, even personally trying to stop him from getting the benefits, instead of following a rulebook. Which is quite surprising to me, as my experience tells me most employees don't care about saving money for their employers unless they're very strongly motivated to do so. > S…

They're motivated financially to do so. There's bonuses.

That is what raincole is asking about. Do you have a source for this, in the Uk context?
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