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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

#431

Post by geysersam »

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…

In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

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

#432

Post by gravypod »

metalliqaz wrote: post #391
observationist wrote: post #388

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"

> government employees work for elected officials

This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:

1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)

2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)

3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments

I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.

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

#433

Post by ccorcos »

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.

> But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing.

Perhaps it's irrational, but I have this viceral feeling that refuses to allow me to believe that people don't have agency.

Who is her manager? Tell them how stupid this is! When they say "there's nothing I can do about it", then talk to their manager!

I recently left Chase bank due to this same kind of helpless attitude they have toward you. And then they ask "have I addressed all of your problems today?" lol

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

#434

Post by kstrauser »

UltraSane wrote: post #429
apical_dendrite wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do they still have POTS lines? Telecom companies are shutting down old SS7 switches so eventually all faxes are ultimately being sent over the Internet and it will be entirely vestigial.

The offices I know of do. We have a PBX, and a "bare" POTS line for the fax.

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

#435

Post by GlenTheMachine »

geysersam wrote: post #431
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #356

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…

In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

It's more complicated than that.

"The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers.

And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on.

In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification.

What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality.

So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works.

In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.

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

#436

Post by canucker2016 »

catapart wrote: post #119
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…

the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all. the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop. the initial phone call undoubtedly happened, but the fax was consumed by the same systems used in medical offices all around the country, which means that it arrived as a pdf in some repository and it…

The feature is called "unified inbox" - faxes appear as a PDF attachment in an email inbox somewhere.

If the government department had a unified inbox for emails/faxes accessible by workers, then there wouldn't have been any "pain" in the form of consumables by the fax machine. That was my worry.

Luckily for the author, the article says the fax number was handled by an old-school, real-life fax machine:

  It was Karen. She sounded breathless. She sounded like she was standing next to a machine that was hyperventilating. In the background, I could hear a rhythmic whir-chunk, whir-chunk.

  "Yes?" I answered, my voice the picture of innocent helpfulness.

  "Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."

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

#437

Post by atoav »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #435
geysersam wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

It's more complicated than that. "The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers. And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case fin…

I know for a fact that in my institution (a university) certain things can't be done by sending a pdf because the guidence our adminstration is accountable to (city, state, national) mandates them to have it in paper. All clerks I have talked to find that silly, but they can't change it and since they have to proof things to these superior offices one cannot expect them to forge these document for you as a service.

There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.

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

#438

Post by atoav »

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…

Murder is one thing, some superior telling you you cannot accept random PDFs sent to you via email for whatever reason and you following that policy is another.

Imagine you run a cash only cafe and one of your baristas starts accepting payment via paypal as a convenience to your customers. Your customers would totally dig it and see it as the morally right thing to do. You however might see some justified problems with it.

If a government office cannot accept pdfs due to policy, the policy is at fault, not the person forced to carry it out. We do not want to live in a world where office clerks make there own rules and ignore policy, based on their subjective morality, with the exception of rejecting or subverting obviously morally wrong extreme policies. Not accepting PDFs is not extreme, it is just bullshit.

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

#439

Post by jrflowers »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #46
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 personality in general, and the rules and constraints that employee is forced to use. Fixed that for you. That's how it should read. Not only is the system questionable in a "the bricks may be individual defensible but the road goes right to hell" way but the kind of people such a system first creates (nobody signs up to be a cop just to strangle black guys over…

>nobody signs up to be a cop just to strangle black guys over petty BS

Of course not. They sign up to be cops to get paid to do that

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

#440

Post by afro88 »

foxglacier wrote: post #122
afro88 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good does hating the cogs do though? Make noise to the people who can change the machine.

It gives you satisfaction. That's the whole value and it can be worth a lot to not hold bitterness long after the problem has passed. I agree with your parent. The cogs are part of the machine, they don't deserve any sympathy just because they chose to do bad things for money any more than a robber deserves sympathy because he's poor.

> The cogs are part of the machine, they don't deserve any sympathy just because they chose to do bad things for money

That's a bit of a stretch saying that someone who enforces the rules around disability for a job is doing bad things for money. These same rules filter out a lot of scammers that if not stoped would mean less money going to the right people.

It's also a low skill low pay job, probably worked by a large percentage of people who are close to the poverty line and just trying to make ends meet to support a family.

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