This reminds me of a story from BOFH ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell ), where he used a black piece of paper, put it into the fax machine, glued both ends together, so the fax scanned an endless roll of black paper and pressed send.
The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
401–410 of 510 posts
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company. Have you heard of pig butchering? Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers: https://www.wired.com/story/the-red-bull-leaks…
That seems like a problem for the telcos to resolve. I.e. don't allow calls from nations that do this.
>>> This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
>> Have you heard of pig butchering? Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers: https://www.wired.com/story/the-red-bull-leaks/.
> That seems like a problem for the telcos to resolve. I.e. don't allow calls from nations that do this.
Yes, telcos have a problem to solve, but that's besides the point. It doesn't justify you being overconfident about who you're actually dealing with or an asshole to someone based on your overconfidence.
You imagine you're being an asshole to some criminal scammer, but you actually could further mistreating some poor soul who's been trafficked by the criminal scammer.
People who don't care about the possibility they're mistreating an innocent person are assholes.
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 fo…
I thought the “performance reviews” they were alluding to were elections.
Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#404Reminds me of Harry Tuttle from Brazil. And then the surreal scene where he becomes a magnet for government receipts and disappears under a pile of them
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#405Although I didn't enjoy this fiction of "angry man against system" genre, he did touch an important truth about the fax machine, which this story doesn't properly expand on. A fax is very useful to bureaucracies because it is hard to prove a fax was ever sent or received at all. It might never arrived and wasn't retried, might have been printed as empty pages, maybe someone else picked it up. This is why it is so use…
Surely some of the online fax services are offering retention and certification of what's sent? Seems like free money to add a checkbox at checkout.
I was talking about the receiving end and at least in the context of this story we are talking about a fax machine, not some fancy document server. Point being that a fax has too many failure modes, which is a feature in these places
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, but don't expect this level of fine granularity from government, any government, thats ridiculous expectations. Heck, I wouldn't expect it neither from any private company as a default state.
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#407The SSA is one of the largest federal employers of blind people. "Karen" could easily be a blind woman on the other end of that call, also below the poverty line on a GS-nothing salary, who now has to deal with a fax machine (hopefully virtual!) she also can't see spitting out 512 pages and jamming. This guy is ... Something.
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#408FFS there’s no fax machine on the other end. There no paper or ink. It’s all electronic.
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 I'm not sure I agree. From a shallow perspective it seems true, but in my experience bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy. They often seem to take a perverse pride in this job - and it is a job that they, at one point, chose. > It's the politicians that people…
"From a shallow perspective it seems true, but in my experience bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy" I worked in a call center when I was studying because it was the only job I could get. Nobody there enjoyed it. Everyone did it because they had no other choice. It's funny, though. In another thread, somebody pointed out that they wouldn't hire a former engineer of a company like Kalshi, Google, or Amazon, an…
> Do you disagree that this person followed the law, and that politicians enacted those laws, and that we voted for these politicians?
This is the definition of brainwashing. You had a false choice between person A and person B who are mostly the same some 4 years ago, and now _you_ are responsible for every stupid policy they enact.
Re: The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
#410What, a government agency doesn't have incoming fax servers that create PDF files?
I had a service for that twenty years ago, for both incoming and outgoing faxes. Cost a few dollars a month, flat rate.
(Now if LibreOffice could edit PDFs decently... My tax accountant sent me a PDF to fill in, but LibreOffice can't get the text and the lines to line up.)