robin_realaThe 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat Before Dinner
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.
The person is an agent of the system. That they bear the brunt of the reaction is the system working as intended.
I guess. Faxing it to someone involved in why the rules are that way would be more satisfying to me.
You can fax your congressman.
I, as a user with 10k+ karma on HN, can testify that the author has all the hallmarks of a real blind person (active in blind communities and so on). I don't have any evidence suggesting that the author ever engaged in deceptive behavior.
In other words, my P(real) > 0.99.
Sure. He's real. ̶̶̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶:̶
"Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay, obscure writer. He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy ending..."
Edit: Yep, appears I have it wrong. Thanks for the pointers. The non-fiction tag missed my eye.
let me finish the rest of the sentence for you, which somehow got deleted from your clipboard. weird bug!
"and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
extra weird, because you are the third person that has experienced this bug where you can only paste the first half of that exact sentence.
I don't have a word for this, but this falls under the class of things where even if the author who wrote this is did not personally do this and is making it up, it has absolutely 100% happened somewhere, many times over.
For example, it's the same for the DailyWTF... I remember how that would be posted here or on a programming reddit and half the comments would be about how it hadn't happened, and you know, maybe whoever wrote those particular words is just making it up, but I've seen enough just in my little tiny slice of human behavior phase space to know that either the story or something indistinguishably close to it most certainly has happened somewhere, at some time.
It is and should be an indictment of the employee personally only in the sense that the employee's tone and manner likely conveyed to OP that she thinks of him as a pothole or a buzzing fly: something you have to deal with, rather than someone who needs to be helped.
Not that she has any power to help him really. I would guess OP is more upset by the dehumanization in her tone, rather than the dehumanization of the system she works within.
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 oppressive, sterile government office. She tries to ignore the overwhelming sense of helplessness and sits down to begin working. Her first call is a person screaming at her about their benefits. She has no power, absolutely no power, to help them due to the rules imposed on her by her superiors, but has to take the abuse regardless and explain the process she has no control over to them. The next call is a case she actually is familiar with: a person claiming to be disabled to collect dole. They aren't, but she has been told that this is a special case and she must work with them. She complies. She sits back in her chair and the phone rings again. An upset person on the other end...
"I have the documents in PDF format"
I agree wholeheartedly! This is exactly what i was thinking the entire time. Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in? Will the 0.5% uptick in toner cost for the year cause the administration to rethink their requirements? He's just taken the immense weight and pain he holds for this process, undeservedly, and placed it upon another undeserving person, then laughed at her anguish.
Yes, life is hard, but surely we can bear our troubles in a way that don't make others harder to bear. Or at least aim your troubles at someone who has any power at all to change things! Find a better way to fight the system, that isn't just stabbing other people trapped in the box with you
I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree.
You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.
I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.
No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
And also, they are not supposed to use their intuitive ideas about what is and what is not dangerous use of software. When they do use their intuitive ideas, hacks happen. Karen here doing what she was told and accepting only formats that her organization security team told her to do is Karen doing the correct thing.
We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us. And we are all paid way more then Karen, but are the first to call Karen an idiot when the hack happens. Karen does not know why pdf is different from doc or whatever. Nor is she required to know.
Disagree. Employees need to be responsible and make their voices heard. The whole thing was justified. We enable nightmares with our acquiescence.
And how does the author (or you) know she doesn't keep raising this?
>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 are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us
No, it'd be a policy maker or CEO who thinks we're in the 90's and that secure email documentation isn't a thing. "We" could suggest so many ways to handle it that would save costs while being more secure. We're not much higher on the totem pole than Karen.
Yet suddenly, we get these incidents and our bosses are suddenly rushing to IT to find a solution. As if 6 months of deliberation wasn't enough.
> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
These huge businesses and huge governments are too big for one person at the bottom of the totem pole to make a difference. Sure, they may share 1/N of the culpability for what their organization is doing, but if they rage quit, they will be immediately replaced with another body. The organization won't even notice it.
Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.
As an alternate framing, with the paperwork be giving her what she needs to go to her boss and escalate, and their boss as needed - the paperwork as a magic ticket for everyone to advocate.
To qualify that, the fax is a limited resource, and I'd be concerned about how what other things the fax might be needed for to help other people in a timely manner...
To qualify that, the fax is a limited resource, and I'd be concerned about how what other things the fax might be needed for to help other people in a timely manner...
Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens.
The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online (https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm), which I found after following the link in the first sentence.
The form is an embedded iFrame from "Adobe Acrobat Sign", supposedly pure Javascript . It would be a bigger story if this form were not accessible to the disabled.
The form includes a place to attach two PDF, text, or image formats. "Attachments are limited to 5MB and 25 pages".
It's tricky, because _sometimes_ they do. And the system doesn't give you guidance on whether you're talking to someone who (officially or not) can change the process. So, based mostly on our personality, we all push a different amount before giving up.
Relatable example: I needed to schedule a Pediatric appointment, her assigned Dr was on vacation, and the first receptionist stonewalled on switching Drs within the practice. The second one did it in 2m on her side and guided me to updating insurance in 2m on my side.
Another similar example: Since it's tax time, I had to call a us gov office with a question. The first rep claimed "their system was down" and couldn't help me. I hung up and called back. The second rep was just nasty and stonewalled me by inundating me with security questions and refusing to "verify" my identity, so I eventually hung up and called back a third time. The third rep answered my question within a few minutes, and was a thorough pleasure to deal with.
I mean, I get that these guys might not be getting paid, with the government shutdown tomfoolery, but come on!
Other responders have replied well, so I will offer a slight augmentation: Yes, this is bad outcome for the bureaucrat, through no mistake of her own. A wrong has been committed against her - but not by the author - by her employer, and the system which employs her and sets these regulations. They cannot (Although they will if asked) claim ignorance or innocence: It is their fault alone for this experience.
My partner works in the office of a prominent Mayor. As a relatively low-totem-pole guy, he has to double-check every vitriolic email sent to the office of the mayor.
Now with AI the screening could be better, but in general every letter has to be read because often people in need of immediate support write very evil things. Think of a dehydrated and irate senior caught in their attic. In a last ditch effort they mail the mayor a racist scree, but they do in fact need help or they will die.
There are lots of people in the government actually trying to help you, despite how depressing their job is
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 law. Bureaucrats run on laws. Laws can be changed. I was able to get my local HOA to accept pdf uploads just be talking with them. Small example but change is possible.
Not as fun as ruining someones day though
> 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.
A few thoughts about the world this situation exists in:
1. Whenever I am dealing with a problem, I always try to say to the person helping me "I know you are not the person responsible for my issue." My goal is to help them not feel that my frustration is directed at them.
2. Government is a special area, especially when it comes to benefits, because a lot of regulations are in place because some random politician got a law passed/amended in order to convince their constituents they were fighting fraud and laziness. This is quite often done with no thought to the downstream effects.
3. I consider myself to be an empathetic person, but there have been times in my life when I have had to work in a job that was very anti-customer. Because doing nice things for customers was punished, I fell into a pattern of finding ways to not do nice things for customers and actually got some enjoyment out of the logical puzzle of denying them. I'm not defending it by any means and I'm quite regretful about it, but I can understand how someone can fall into that mentality.
4. I believe the real failure here, like so many other things, is the system design. The disability benefits system in the author's case seems to be providing benefits to permanently disabled and temporarily disabled people. The review process should be differentiating between these two groups. As the author points out, they are never not going to be blind.
I think a better way to communicate the frustration would have been finding the fax number for the minister responsible for the government department and faxing THEM the documentation, as they have the power to change things.
While I do agree generally, there are a couple things to note
1. Author was made to pay for the bureaucracy and a rigid rule, and found a way to revert that. Now Karen pays the price for the bureaucracy. In the end Author made it a 0 sum game while there was not necessarily a need... and yet fair is fair, he was entered in the game without asking, and he played it.
2. > She has no power, absolutely no power
I doubt if this is true. In the end she said "fine we'll mark the file as updated" while having received only partially what Author sent. This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
In the end I'm not sure if it was worth making someone else suffer, there was probably that 2 pages file that they needed to send, which would have been enough to send everyone on their merry way. Beyond just creating suffering to someone else, that could have very well ended with "fine, we'll review those 500 pages, I'm not sure if we can do that by the deadline".
Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules.
Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.
Is this an outdated requirement? What's the attack surface of an email vs fax? Unless they ban phones at the office, someone could just take a photo of the documents the patient faxed or mailed them
> What's the attack surface of an email vs fax?
I believe the concern is while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.
The ending is a little hard to believe.
My sister has a job somewhat like this for a school system. Multiply the number of working hours by the number of workers, divide by the number of active cases and the number of hours each case takes to resolve. The answer is that a large number of cases will not be done by their deadlines.
If someone wanted to send her a 500 page fax, she’s just going to shrug and work on something else. If she gives it even a passing thought, it would be “this ass better hope his fax finishes printing before the deadline for benefit cutoff”
I worked briefly with an idvidual who had this extreme bureaucratic mentality. I just can't even imagine how you can talk to another person and have no empathy at all for their situation and only care about the process. I also know processes exist for a reason, people will abuse things, and these processes are designed to prevent abuse.
I don't have an answer. I just know that my empathy is too strong. I could never be so rigid and would not thrive in a career requiring that level of disconnect.