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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

#451

Post by efreak »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #412
apical_dendrite wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how many doctors still rely on a physical fax machine.

I was thinking of doctors offices and pharmacies when I asked. My doctor has a physical fax machine in the back of the office. I was hoping things might be a little bit more advanced elsewhere. It hurts my soul to see people print a document to fax it before throwing it away. I was going to say it would be nice if you would just choose a fax machine from the print dialogue. You can… if it’s set up. Sigh.

You can do the reverse, too. Hook up a dial-up modem to your PC and you can send and receive faxes on it. The software is built-in, though you'll probably want to configure it not to receive faxes automatically on your landline unless it's dedicated for that purpose. This has been built into Windows since at least Windows xp, probably been possible since 3.x. There's also Linux and probably Mac software available too. In Windows 11, I think the fax program isn't installed by default anymore, you might have to add it via optionalfeatures.exe.

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

#452

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc.

Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.

I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!

As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!

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

#453

Post by subscribed »

hunterpayne wrote: post #443
sl-1 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not end to end encrypted? I'd wager most email traffic is encrypted while in transit, but of course that depends on the service providers. And it does sit unencrypted when stored.

If you are emailing from a Yahoo address to a GMail address, I would bet it is. If it is going to some .gov address, who knows...maybe...maybe not???

Easy to check if you were curious.

telnet to the mail server on the relevant port, either ssl, or TLS, or stattls.

You'll know :)

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

#454

Post by dqv »

spicymaki wrote: post #51

Aside from the AI writing the blog itself seems to have a false timeline. It says there are posts from April 2017, but the domain has only been up for a year. There is all of this promotion about books, podcasts, volunteering to support the author. What is this about?

The author has existed online since at least 2011, so it wouldn't surprise me that he has just accumulated posts over time and migrated them, maybe haphazardly, to new installations. He's reader-funded which would explain what looks like some lost domain registrations over the years.

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

#455

Post by gravypod »

adammarples wrote: post #448
handoflixue wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept behind the process might be fine. The demand that poor blind people acquire and submit records through an obscure technology, at their own personal expenses, on short deadline, is obviously absurd. In particular, the requirement to re-prove basic facts suggests a fundamentally hostile design - you could just ask them to send a simple email asserting that yes, they are still disabled; or have them check a…

Who else is supposed to aquire and submit the records? If I'm getting free money for five years and all that's required is a fax every five years, I wouldn't consider that particularly burdensome. I have to fill in a timesheet every week.

Maybe a better way to accomplish this is a free yearly physical with a doctor? The doctor can then be required to share any changes in disability with the government. Missing x years of appointments also stops your benefits. If you can't come to the doctor maybe they could do a house call?

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

#456

Post by dqv »

scottlamb wrote: post #386
squigz wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inconvenience of reloading the fax machine is pushing out someone who is trying to do good? It's not just the faxing that causes people to act the way Karen…

I hear you...to an extent. I just got off the phone with Comcast Business Class, asking for a refund after I had 26 hours of downtime in the past week. Not a company with a great reputation for customer service, and the agent I spoke with was probably not exactly earning a six-figure salary. He was empathetic. The outcome was unsatisfactory [1], but he was polite, he said he understood how important availability is m…

I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, some people thrive on talking to a lot of people. For everyone else, it can be exhausting. It's hard to navigate social differences talking to 15+ strangers every hour for 8 hours. Each person has a unique expectation about how to relate to them. It's hard knowing, for example, who wants to be interrupted and who doesn't [0]. Some people talk in vagueries with exposition, making it hard to understand what it is they want, but feel they have communicated clearly, so get upset at being asked questions. I could go on and on about this. The end result is an absolutely JUICED frontal lobe, though. "Why don't you find another job" is a common question to people and I don't think people with a juiced frontal lobe have the capability to reason their way into getting their resume and applying to new jobs. To remember that comment would be to remember 25 calls ago that someone told you to find a new job.

> He was empathetic.

I don't understand what this means when people say it. Empathetic means having empathy for someone, which means imagining being in their situation, and feeling the feeling associated with that situation. That takes a long time for me, like a few minutes, uninterrupted, at least. So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy, that's just saying words that sound like empathy. And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them (because how are you supposed to feel frustrated without being frustrated?) so as not to make the customer upset.

Customers hate to hear (in a sort of "stop being upset that's annoying" way) sadness or anxiety or the braced statements of a person (often perceived as rude) used to having to repeat, for the 50th time, something people don't want to hear. I do have the empathy to recognize this when a customer service agent does it and cut them the slack because probably had to spend all their empathy on someone else.

Then I read about things like surface acting vs deep acting and see that the surface acting part is bad for your emotional health but that deep acting takes a lot of extra energy [1]!

Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?

"that's all it takes" might be underselling the dynamic here.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/interrupting-coop... https://archive.is/I4RpG

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor#Surface_and_de...

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

#457

Post by cess11 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #238
cess11 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, shouldn't make her workday stressful, she's just following orders.

I file this under " don't be a dick, especially to the disabled". You wonder why most bankers avoid a lot of this, despite handling one of the most stressful aspect of modern humanity? It's becsuse they tend to be thr friendliest talkers out there. They know the reputation and trust of the banking system is what keeps their money in. They can be just as slimy as a used car salesman in tactics, but we're still interfa…

Many people go into public service with an attitude of 'I want to help people'.

The catch is that unless it's some form of care or perhaps fire-fighting, there's a high risk that it'll be pretty nasty stuff. Things like denying people decency, perhaps even life, because they were slow to respond or for once didn't get help filling out some form or whatever. Throwing suffering, poor people out on the streets, and then someone else employed by the state hound them until they're almost invisible.

HR people usually say the same and realise too late that they're not going to be as appreciated as they'd hoped, at least not by the people they initially thought they'd help out.

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

#458

Post by masklinn »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #349
masklinn wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air. So your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to. Why, then, are you advocating for harassing front-line low-level employees? Go for the people w…

>your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to. I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee. It can be the custome, it can be a malicious actor. It can be the federal or state government. But it has to come from outside or up top. I don't know how you…

> I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee.

When you harass an employee it’s still word from an employee. And it’s very optimistic to think said words will go beyond you being an asshole doing asshole things.

> I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything"

You seem confused. I never said that, you just invented it from me saying that harassing front line employees is useless.

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

#459

Post by johnnyanmac »

cess11 wrote: post #457
johnnyanmac wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I file this under " don't be a dick, especially to the disabled". You wonder why most bankers avoid a lot of this, despite handling one of the most stressful aspect of modern humanity? It's becsuse they tend to be thr friendliest talkers out there. They know the reputation and trust of the banking system is what keeps their money in. They can be just as slimy as a used car salesman in tactics, but we're still interfa…

Many people go into public service with an attitude of 'I want to help people'. The catch is that unless it's some form of care or perhaps fire-fighting, there's a high risk that it'll be pretty nasty stuff. Things like denying people decency, perhaps even life, because they were slow to respond or for once didn't get help filling out some form or whatever. Throwing suffering, poor people out on the streets, and then…

I'm sure some do. But the federal government is the biggest employer. I see that as inevitably doing a job because its a job.

I'm not saying to be perfect on the job or anything. I'm sure like most jobs it grinds on you. But I've never seen a situation where taking it out (passively or actively) on the customer directly has ever ended well. And there's many, many times where I wanted to actively do so.

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

#460

Post by johnnyanmac »

masklinn wrote: post #458
johnnyanmac wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to. I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee. It can be the custome, it can be a malicious actor. It can be the federal or state government. But it has to come from outside or up top. I don't know how you…

> I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee. When you harass an employee it’s still word from an employee. And it’s very optimistic to think said words will go beyond you being an asshole doing asshole things. > I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything" You seem confused. I never said that, you just invented…

I "invented" it from

>So your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.

Which somehow got the exsct opposite message I was giving:

>inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee.

I don't know how you got your conclusion from that message.

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