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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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…

People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, read…

> with no market feedback

It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.

government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"

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

#392
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My exact thoughts. Too often we lash out at the person who is working within a Kafkaesque system as a lowly bureaucrat. Attack the system. Find the fax number for the chief of your social security administration. Get a letter sending group together. The democratic system is slow and terrible but atleast the author seems to live in one. There should be a political call to action here. Call xyz or work to change this l…

> There should be a political call to action here A real problem in both benefits claiming and immigration systems is that there are voters on the other side loudly demanding that the system be made more hostile and kafkaesque.

And bear in mind that there are quite a few politicians willing to monetize that by actually implementing those more hostile and kafkaesque rules.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine 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 ha…

How dare ! I'll assume you're misrepresenting me out of genuine misunderstanding, rather than snark, so to that end: I'm not suggesting no one every take a job they don't like (for any reason whatsoever!). I'm suggesting that everyone recognize the position they are in and make peace with it. You're in a job that isn't very nice? Got it! Been there. Feel for you. Honestly! But why, on earth, would that afford you pit…

It's not intended to be a misrepresentation, as much as it is to use exaggeration to call attention to how suggestions like

> "You are the face of the machine that I am trying to deal with. If you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine."

might be barking up the wrong tree somewhat.

Often people will be in any given job because they can't easily get anything else and they just have to make ends meet, and especially in the present circumstance (affordability crisis in a lot of places), I couldn't blame them for being the face of some such machine. Saying that they should quit on principle feels insulting to me, when they often have little to no sway and are treated as disposable cogs in said machine.

That's why I wouldn't be upset at (or at least wouldn't take it out on) the people enforcing various asinine and straight up bad policies - since that's like blaming a line worker for the price increases of the product they just sell. I think the original post actually gets a lot of that nuance right - societal impact, the human aspect and so on. I don't wholly disagree with it, just that element. Of course, they shouldn't give you attitude either, but there's probably ways to handle that that aren't disruptive to the business continuity and others receiving their services. Ergo my suggestion that everyone in that situation could have handled it better.

> You are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such.

It's too easy to take this as a justification that leads to workers being treated like shit for the decisions of their bosses or even someone higher up in an org chart they haven't even met.

> No amount of hostility will change the policy, but hostility will surely get different (sometimes better; not often) results than acquiescence. Recognize that it's not hostility towards you and - god forbid - enjoy the fact that someone else notices how fucking shitty the machine you work for is.

This is okay when it's harmless banter and some camaraderie. This isn't good when you're just sitting there in a call centre with someone who's deeply frustrated and is cursing you out or is looking for an argument - you might even agree with their frustrations, but that doesn't mean that you yourself deserve that. One of my friends worked in one for a few years and there definitely are some stories that made me feel sorry for them.

I'm probably reading into it too much. Maybe just ask to talk to her manager directly, on the account that they might at least pass it up the chain. At the very least, I do think that it would have been better to send the super long fax mentioned in the post to the person who made that policy, with a note saying "Since security is of utmost importance, I entrust that you will handle the attached documents appropriately!" blow up their fax machine (or their assistant's, for that matter) not the Karen that's just doing her job.

Of course, there are limits to this - blatantly illegal or inhumane practices should still sway you towards quitting ASAP, but a Karen might not know the first thing about what InfoSec policies are good or not. Or she might genuinely enjoy making people jump through hoops - I don't have enough context here to say anything for certain, but that in general, there should be basic human decency and respect going both ways.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. But I understand that you don't literally need to print every fax request immediately, right?

That's the dumbest part of this situation. This sounds like an 80 movies trope, but here we are decades later.

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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…

People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, read…

>Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.

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

#398

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…

I'm with you that TFA comes off as mean spirited and needlessly so. But having worked in large orgs in highly regulated and bureaucratic sectors (aerospace), sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly. Policy like "we can't accept email for security purposes" comes from total fucking morons in sub-C level upper management who have no insight into how the business actually works, for whom it's…

> sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly.

This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, read…

> with no market feedback It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows. government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"

Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional.

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.

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

#400
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.

How smooth are your experiences with the system? I've dealt with only one other government system like this and it was impenetrable, gave up after 6 months of calling, never receiving the benefit. I'm unsure how someone can experience a system that has no thought to their well-being and then _not_ find gratification in the small person winning.
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