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.
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 basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.
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, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.
You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.
They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.
This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.
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.
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"
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.
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.
In other words, my P(real) > 0.99.
Edit: Yep, appears I have it wrong. Thanks for the pointers. The non-fiction tag missed my eye.
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.
"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.
Several large corporations really are guilty of murdering innocent people on a regular basis. Even still, if you find a low wage worker in that company's mail room and beat the shit out of them to make yourself feel better it's you who are the asshole, and it does nothing to stop the killing.
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.
I definitely agree - but if the organization creates pain as an externality, then there's no incentive for them to change. Making them realize the cost of their decisions seems appropriate and just and not-even-abusive. Yelling at the person on the phone is bad and doesn't help anyone. Malicious compliance like this helps motivate them to escalate their concerns to people who can change the policy.
But this is exactly what she chooses to do every morning.
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 like us elected because they promised to cut wasteful spending
If you're blaming us so tenuously, then I definitely don't agree with taking the blame away from the bureaucrats
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, and people were quick to defend these people. What if you couldn't get a job anywhere else? I have a lot more sympathy for a government employee who has to answer calls from angry people than an engineer at Kalshi, because the latter likely has a lot more options than the former.
"If you're blaming us so tenuously"
Do you disagree that this person followed the law, and that politicians enacted those laws, and that we voted for these politicians?
I phoned them and they said I need to pay for the new documentation because I had a time limit to report it undelivered. Fine, that's my fault, but I need to tax it now otherwise I'll get fined, and I have no way to do it. I asked her how to do it and she said there is "no way" she can tax it over the phone I need to wait for the documentation. I told her I'll get fined and she said there is no way to tax it over the phone unless I have the VIN number which I won't have. Sorry, there's nothing she can do.
I told her I actually have the VIN number to hand, does she want me to read it for her? Suddenly she didn't need it and just needed card details. The impossible bureaucratic process was suddenly gone now. She just hadn't wanted to help.
Was this woman just following the law? Was it the fault of the politicians? Me, as a voter? She had no other choice than refusing to help?
I don't know what the law is, so I don't know if she was.
"Was it the fault of the politicians? Me, as a voter? She had no other choice than refusing to help?"
Based on my experience, I'll guess that her office was understaffed and she was overworked, and her performance was judged on how quickly she ends calls.
Dunno if that's your fault. Who do you vote for? People who promise to cut budgets and taxes? Then yes, it was partly your fault.
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.
What possible kind of 'experience' could you have to judge such a thing, save for personal preconceptions and biases?
I've worked in a variety of places. Public sector, banks, places with higher and lower levels of bureaucracy. As everyone else, I've also been on the receiving end of dealing with bureaucracy. There seems to be a big divide in how long people have been working at places like that - up to 1-2 years, or 20+ years, and a big difference in the type of people in those two groups.
Assuming that it's a preconception and not observed is a bizarre assumption.
Right, and the point was that personal observations and impressions are a really poor way to judge the internal thoughts, feelings and motivations of random strangers. I.e. that nobody could possibly come to this determination in any robust way.
Moreover, it's exactly the kind of conclusion that suffers from common biases, and that we should be inherently skeptical of.
It's really not, it's basic psychology. People rarely change their opinions based on evidence.
Having said that, in 50 years on this planet and countless interactions with government employees, I haven't had a single bad one. I do try to be kind and accommodating because I know their jobs are often shit and they have to deal with asshats all day long, and maybe that has an impact on how they treat me.
I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago I changed the address on my car but didn't receive the documentation and didn't realise for a few months. Then I realised the tax was due and I hadn't had a reminder or this paperwork - one of which is needed to tax it.
I phoned them and they said I need to pay for the new documentation because I had a time limit to report it undelivered. Fine, that's my fault, but I need to tax it now otherwise I'll get fined, and I have no way to do it. I asked her how to do it and she said there is "no way" she can tax it over the phone I need to wait for the documentation. I told her I'll get fined and she said there is no way to tax it over the phone unless I have the VIN number which I won't have. Sorry, there's nothing she can do.
I told her I actually have the VIN number to hand, does she want me to read it for her? Suddenly she didn't need it and just needed card details. The impossible bureaucratic process was suddenly gone now. She just hadn't wanted to help.
I'm baffled that people in this thread are acting like almost everyone hasn't had a similar experience at one time or another.
Nobody is saying that. Government employees have bad days, too, and some are probably just assholes. That's a far cry from saying malicious stuff like "bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy. They often seem to take a perverse pride in this job."
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 petty BS, nobody signs up to work in the disability office to give legit cases the runaround, etc, these people became this way) and then retains are not necessarily great.
And before anyone screeches at me, yes there's plenty of areas of private industry that are just as bad.
"I have the documents in PDF format"
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
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.
There are a thousand reasons why someone might be miserable, might resign or ask for a raise, but at the next monthly meeting or whatever opportunity they have for receiving suggestions, an employee who actually likes you will be more likely to speak up and get something done.
This has worked for me at least in the B2B space, where I'm affecting one of 50 state applications engineers or something like that. I'm aware that this isn't exactly the same as the federal government that employs like 3 million people, but the principle is the same.
If you got on Karen's good side, she might grouse with you that sending and receiving faxes is archaic, that mail is slow, agree that printed paper's not that accommodating to blind people, and acknowledge that it's cruel and wasteful to ask people to prove their chronic, incurable disabilities every year under threat of taking away their benefits through these platforms. You could work together and laugh about how funny it would be to communicate the real costs and hardships with her supervisors if you literally faxed 1,200 pages of a PDF, wearing through multiple toner cartridges and reams of paper, generating a box that she could drop on the table with a "thud" to emphasize that they should stop doing that.
That might create change, especially if it happens for multiple employees multiple times a day.
Making a bureaucrat miserable because they have a lot of paperwork to do is not going to create change.
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.
Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.
I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.
Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?
I don't necessarily agree with the OPs approach. He could have filed a complaint or done any number of things that may have been better. But in the heat of the moment nobody is making perfectly rational decisions.
Regardless, we need to fight back against abusive systems on the big and on the small. We won't always get it right but the act of fighting is what matters.
What I'm responding to the the notion that "no action you can take matters." Specifically this:
>Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
I just don't believe that. Small actions do matter and are necessary because they enable the big actions later. You have to start somewhere. Even if it feels insurmountable. No major change ever just happened in isolation, it always happens when enough people have had enough and fought back enough that the change was inevitable.
Worker rights didn't just spontaneously appear because enough people wanted them. They came about through organizing, coordinating and leading. Same for Women's suffrage, Civil rights, gay rights...
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.
No, all you're accomplishing is being an ass to that person. They're a replaceable cog in a machine. And often their role as just as much to be a punching bag for assholes like you, to take the hits instead of who's really responsible, than whatever other business function they're performing. The people responsible aren't idiots, they know what they're going.
The only thing being an ass to someone who's just a cog accomplishes is making yourself into an asshole.
Do you have a citation for that or is that just an idea of a villain you've invented in your head? Karen doesn't hold any power whatsoever over anyone. Karen is a low level employee who has to answer the phones all day. She doesn't decide who gets benefits or not. She didn't create the Continuing Disability Review. She didn't create the security policy that said they should refuse to open PDF attachments from random people who email them. She doesn't need to "get bitten" any more than you do.
If you're talking about Matthew 10, I think you read that bible passage exactly backward. Jesus was saying not to worry about any persecution caused by following him, because the responsibility is not yours. They are really persecuting him, "the master", and if you just keep doing what he says you will come out on top, even if you are killed, and they will get theirs in the end.
(Not that I agree. As an atheist, it feels coercive. But that's clearly what Matthew 10 is saying)
Perhaps, but the question to ask is not “how to apply some pressure” but “how to apply pressure in the place where it’s most effective.
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.
I don’t think that is true. Rules that you have to use a fax machine are enshrined in outdated laws. No IT professional is going to say to use a fax machine for security.
The same thing is true for a lot of security practices. Our company had silly password rotation policies because of certification requirements, not because our IT team thought it was necessary.
An IT professional will say don't open PDF files from every random email that comes into your publicly posted email address though.
Yes, but a boss being unable to receive a fax because the machine is "otherwise occupied" may do that.
Edit: can't even confirm that it really is only fax and physical mail that's available; on a cursory search, tackling this fully online is already well possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544562
It is entirely possible for both parties to have simply missed thinking of this. Or for me to be missing or misunderstanding something.
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.
That’s a hilarious fantasy you have here.
The system is largely bad. That's mostly agreed by each side. I feel like what you're asking for—to treat others as humans—is right and yet only going in one direction. There's a disagreement between the company and the customer and instead of showing up the company disingenuously gives you an unrelated powerless person to speak to. The expectation is that you shouldn't count them as the company, you count them as a human—and you're supposed to do that _because_ the company underpays them and gives them no power.
You see this all the time in cybersecurity. Nobody cares until there's a breach. Nobody would care if he faxed 25 pages and mildly inconvenienced Karen, but by faxing 500 pages and inconveniencing the whole office, it's going to start something. Even if it takes them another 5 years to fix the process, it's a start.
Realistically, the change will probably be "no more than 25 pages of evidence required". But that's also a win for the person being asked for it.
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. Being a nuisance (or letting nature take its course, in the perspective of an employee) is much more powerful to these kinds of organizations than words.
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 who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.
And even if you don't have the energy to keep fighting after your own case has been fixed (a very common remedy when it's usually much easier to grease the squeaky wheel than to actually fix the axle), try to leave information on your process and contact points in accessible locations so that those afterwards can start a step or two ahead.
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 construed that as "so customers can't do anything"
>Go for the people who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.
If you've seen local policy these days... Yeah, not really. LA just had a new Metro line approved despite the mayor's attempts to delay the vote. Policy isn't working with us.
I won't say escalation doesnt work, but I haven't seen it pulled off. Wait queues for help is already so long, so asking more time of the customer might not be feasible. It's already inefficient enough that we need go use Synchronous calls to to do all these duties.
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/.
Immoral assholes can out-immoral you.
>> 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.
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.
I mean, I get that these guys might not be getting paid, with the government shutdown tomfoolery, but come on!
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".
More likely he had a fun idea and ran with it to illustrate other problems he's had.
I can say from personal experience that the people on the phone for US Social Security are enforcing inhumane policies. A relative with a speech impediment and in serious pain who was unable to travel to the office for an interview had to be ready for a phone call. If the phone wasn't answered after four rings, have to reschedule a phone call. When the phone call arrived, they had to answer questions personally without assistance or "coaching". The caller couldn't understand the relative due to the speech impediment, and the relative was in distress and having difficulty understanding the questions. But we weren't supposed to help.
He never chose to be blind. He pays his taxes. He is the customer.
She chose to be part of The System. She is paid to provide a service, within The System's rules.
I have zero empathy for her. Everything is working as intended.
You have me thinking about old customer service war stories now, I wanted to share one of the more ridiculous ones. A tornado came through the small town and knocked out the utility lines. Being a dial-up ISP our infrastructure was a bit messed up for a few days. Once it was all squared away we had an angry customer call and yell at us about how we were offline for a few days and how unprofessional it was to not let him know that we were going offline. That he wasn't so much mad we were offline but we should have told him so he could have planned around it. He was yelling so much. I finally just said "sir, next time we schedule a tornado I will be sure to let you know." and he accepted the answer and thanked me. People are so odd.
There are bad customers for sure, but we also cheat good customers out of what they’re owed until they’re “bad.” The customer can yell or eat the cost. I think I can both feel bad for the employee and not place much blame on the customer given customer service as a quasi profit center.
anguish? as in, "excruciating pain" or "agonizing torment"?
i dont understand where the "anguish" comes from. he didnt yell at her, berate her, hit her, cause her to be fired, submit a malicious complaint, or anything of the sort. he sent her a long fax. oh no!
if i was in her position, i would shrug and hand my boss the 500 pieces of paper.
if you are just a cog in the machine, it is not mentally healthy to take on the responsibility of more than a cog. caring is the responsibility of non-cogs.
edit: today i learned that sending a long fax is apparently a method of torture, causing mental anguish to the receiver. my bad. profuse apologies to anyone i have sent a longer fax to, i had no idea the mental damage i was causing. i can only hope that god will forgive my sins.
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 harder for disabled people to receive the support they need).
And OP perhaps maybe should have filed a complaint or something, maybe contact a news org if they’re feeling wronged, instead of being petty like that. What if someone else doesn’t receive their services in a timely manner over that bullshit? It felt more like feeling triumphant over inconveniencing someone and getting back at them in a sense.
I can’t say I don’t find that sort of thing relatable, but yeah it probably could have been handled better by everyone. I guess what I’m saying is that they shouldn’t have been subjected to the circumstance that lead to them being a jerk, but the choice to be one is on them.
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 pity when you take part in making life shitty for other people? You knew that was the job. You called the job 'not nice'. Recognize that you are being shitty to someone. Yes, on behalf of a company. That part goes both ways. You aren't responsible for the shitty things you're doing - that's the machine's responsibility. You are just doing shitty things. You don't get absolved from that just because you didn't make the call. It's still perfectly rational to resent the person that is being shitty to you.
And, overall, it seems like we mostly agree. Not a lot of people "in the right", in this story. I won't discount that it's the caller's prerogative to be a jerk (even if it's just being a jerk "back"), and that's on them. Just want to stake the claim that while I accept that, the standard must reciprocate to the actual agent on the phone as well.
> "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.
Here's the real situation: the people that pick up the phone when you call them up aren't going to be paid much above minimum wage at all. They have zero institutional power to fix anything. You're yelling at people that, themselves, almost certainly are only barely making enough money to get by either.
It is worthless to yell at these people because they can't fix shit; they don't set policies, they have no power to fix things and all your yelling is going to achieve is at best counterproductive to what you want to get done (since now the front facing employee dislikes you personally and is less inclined to try and help you out) and at worst is going to get you into further trouble when you do need something routine done. (Since now you're on the list of "people that the employees don't want to put any extra effort into since they're jerks".)
There are people that get paid to be the complaints facing entity of the organization, who are paid to withstand whatever shit you can throw at them and who have an ability to fix up whatever you needed in specific. They're not the people that pick up the phone.
What you need to do is channel the inner Karen and ask to speak to the manager. The manager can help you with this sort of thing, they are the ones that can do shit to avoid sustaining the machine, because they have a career they want to grow into and risk actual consequences for pissing people off.
Be polite (but firm; you don't need to be walked over) to the first tier support employees, even if they can't help you. Save the complaints for the manager (who you shouldn't be afraid to ask to speak to either). The managers job is to deal with the real complaints, not the routine stuff that just happens to need a human involved. They are taking a job to be the face of the machine for reasons other than "I literally need a minimum wage job to survive".
It was OOP that chose to escalate this to malicious compliance and ascribed a lot more to her attitude than what's actually said. OOP assumed that she was out to get him in specific, when nothing in the described call even suggests as much.
The correct response would've been to ask for the manager and if the manager chooses to stonewall in an obnoxious way (which is possible!), then you pull the frustrating fax from hell on them. At that point, you're not just speaking to someone who has no power to fix shit, you're talking to someone who does have the power to fix shit and chooses to be a stick in the mud about it. That's when being a jerk back is deserved.
Being a jerk to low paid employees in this manner is unacceptable, rude and makes me think a lot less of the person writing it.
The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.
Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.
See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.
yeah honestly. If I was in that position I'd probably think it's funny and just stick the whole stack in a folder and laugh about the dumb process.
I know the things HN hates most are analogies and anecdotes, but here's a chance to torture myself by offering one. I sat down on day at the BMV, to register a kayak. Literally everyone is my state except the wildlife enforcement officers think the whole idea is absolutely absurdly retarded. This was in a jam packed BMV with a long line. No one but one elderly lady even knew how to do it, because most people don't submit themselves to such a stupid idea as registering their kayak, even though it was required. A lady sat down with me, PECKED all the information in over a period of 15 minutes. Then showed me the form. It had the wrong hull number on it, so I told her, and she had to redo it all over again pecking it in for another 15 minutes.
After this she still got the hull number wrong. Another 15 minutes later, and she got the hull number yet again. Finally She did it again and still got the hull number wrong yet again and I just gave up and accepted the registration she gave me even though it was completely worthless to me. Not a single person at the BMV gave a single shit that this took this long nor the fact it would hold everyone up, everyone has an endless list of shit to do and there will be more waiting for them tomorrow. If it causes the machine to slow down they could not give one single fuck. They are not the least bit bothered.
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 trying to navigate the process. Good job.
Were I the reader that donated them that $20, I'd issue a charge back now.
I suspect this is a revenge fantasy rather than something that actually happened.
As for who's responsible - it's a mix. Some people who deal with these situations are doing their jobs because they have no choice.
Some are active sadists and do the job because they get to bully the weak.
This happens a lot in benefits management, and also in immigration, in most countries.
You underestimate government inefficiency. You are correct, but I can also see a system that naively prints whatever is verified as a valid entry automatically.
I'm not so naive as to think there's no podunk, crossroads "town" out there that has some mayberry-ass fax machine just spitting out whatever you send it. But given how attractive government offices are to people for either pranking or ...ahem redressing via their fax machines since the late 70's, it's more common than you might believe for even the smallest little townships to have a contract with a company that turns faxes into emails.
Similar approaches are utilized in other areas of british government, unfortunately.
Government works the opposite of industry. In industry you win power/prestige/money generally by getting more profits which usually means making needlessly inefficient process less so (although in large company with multiple layers of middle management this can become completely decoupled). In government there is no concept of profit so you win more power/prestige/money by having more headcount and paperwork to shuffle around which justify your existence.
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.
That's the dumbest part of this situation. This sounds like an 80 movies trope, but here we are decades later.
I'll admit, this is the authors bias. And we know such hackers are not the best a social cues. But taking him as his word: I can 100% visualize the kind of tone Karen made here at the author. The kind that says "I've done this 1000 times and I know how this works. I know most people won't bother. I just need to get person over with and move on". An all too familiar tone in this cold, lonely world.
I'm not going to say she deserved it. But I have no sympathy either. And sadly, this is the only legal channel we have for this without any lawyer funding. I don't see any other way to really make them listen than to reveal enough inconvenience in the real world, not in a civil matter in a townhall.
If there's any class of individual in whom I'm willing to place greater than average trust in their ability to read vocal tones, it's probably blind people. Just sayin'.
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.
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".
This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
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
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
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.
Does this author live in a country where the government staff has incentive to reject the dole? Some kind of KPI? Otherwise why the author assume this woman is actively trying to stop him from getting his benefit?
I genuinely wonder that. In my country I've never heard that.
The UK disability system is notorious for compliance hurdles. Quite a lot of people including relatives of mine have had claims denied by the bureaucracy, applied for review (which is done by an external judge), and had it reinstated.
It was even worse when the system was outsourced to ATOS.
I've also heard stories about the Norwegian NAV. I don't think this is confined to any one country.
It's not hard to understand. There's constant political budget pressure, and narratives about "scoungers". So the system gets set to default-deny and told to limit the cost of claims by any means necessary.
I said that the author insinuates the woman is actively, even personally trying to stop him from getting the benefits, instead of following a rulebook. Which is quite surprising to me, as my experience tells me most employees don't care about saving money for their employers unless they're very strongly motivated to do so.
> She was counting on the friction of the physical world to make me give up.
These types of problems usually persist because it's hard to know who is responsible. It's not just the customer support person or the president/governor - I assume the invisible senior leaders in-between hold a lot of power.
I'd happily support an investigative journalist who exposed exactly why these problems exist and which individual humans are responsible.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and this is the sort of thing that might make Karen suggest to her boss that they accept PDF files.
I'm not sure what state or country this was written in, but requiring physical copies or a fax is very likely a legal requirement.
Also how could she just decide that the disability status is accepted without checking the documents. That is just fraud...
It’s commonly practiced and we can see why.
Nevertheless, assuming it's true, the author did expose the lie of Karen or rather the system. It wasn't the real evidence that changed her mind, according to her comments, it was the punitive arm-twisting applied to them by the DoS of the fax machine.
In short, the answer to complacency isn't "more complacency".
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 easier to say "no" than it is to say "yes".
It's entirely plausible that this episode (which I bet blew through a lot of PPNS budget in toner) caused some mid level manager to report the process breakage, kicking off a review of whether they really need fax.
This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.
It's amazing how we still haven't learnt that.
These sorts of don't hate the cogs hate the machine takes are worthless because they create an instant exploit where the machine can be as bad as it wants as long as it hides behind the cogs.
The exploit is already there whether or not you blame the cogs. Did blaming the cogs in this instance solve anything? Are disability benefits reformed in any way?
One letter "doesn't do anything", but a surprisingly small number of letters does. And the one Congressmen "can't do anything", but usually a small number of Congressmen can sway real change. HN often advocates writing angry letters to Congress because it understands this dynamic.
You will never be allowed to talk to the people who made the fax policy; they hired people like Karen specifically to make sure that doesn't happen. The person who can talk to management is... Karen.
These systems usually settle into a steady state where the interface with the public receives an acceptable amount of abuse. I guarantee that if a few people a month did what OP claims to have done, they'd figure out how to take docs over email pretty quickly.
They usually offer "casework" services where a staffer will facilitate their constituent's interactions with federal agencies. This would probably help get the OP's specific issue solved AND make the legislators aware of the problem more generally. My impression is that agencies are often pretty responsive to these things: nobody wants to be on a senator's bad side.
And saying it doesn't is like saying "my one piece of litter won't make the park dirty". Just because you can't see the effect one instance has doesn't mean that it isn't meaningful when added all up.
Regardless it doesn’t matter in the end. Because you don’t litter, I don’t litter, vast swaths of the population don’t litter
Yet still, I routinely see otherwise nice parks around me trashed.
If you goal is to not have a machine at all for some particular thing, then potentially no one wanting to work a job that does that thing might be an effective way of abating the machine from doing that.
Although inconveniencing bureaucrats handling disability benefits is probably a poor starting point no matter what your opinion is.
https://theinquisitivejournal.com/2023/04/07/the-power-of-pe...
Presumably the blog writer has never worked in a corporate hierarchy, let alone at the lowest of the low of being in a call centre. They sound like a horrible person whose interactions with the outside world being driven from being terminally online (the choice of Karen was telling)
> He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy endings
Perhaps "Karen" was disabled, having lost both her legs from a drunk driver as she selflessly threw herself into harms way to rescue some innocent kids. I hope she gets a happy ending.
never blame anyone for anything
Assigning blame, via agency or otherwise, and the associated social or legal consequences are additional signals in the environment that influence and change behavior.
If the actions of an individual were involved in propagating some chain of events, then it's perfectly valid to respond to their involvement, via social stigma, punishment, etc, regardless of whether or not there is "agency". The knowledge and anticipation of a similar response changes future actor's behavior, with or without free will.
This discussion itself is exactly an example of this in practice. If there's no such thing as agency, then us talking about what someone should or shouldn't do, given whether there is free will, have any influence on anything, except that it does because interacting with these ideas themselves change behavior, with or without free will.
This is what people mean when they say we should just ignore the question of free will entirely, because it doesn't really factor into how we should design the social contract.
Of course people act accordingly to the system they're in. If they expect punishment for an action, or not, changes their behaviour. By defining what's punishable, we can change the course of action. But if you look at any action which already happened, you can't blame anyone for it, because it had to happen that way, given the circumstances.
Medical departments aren't about helping you out anymore. When you work in a hospital, you do what your rule book says. If someone doesn't have their paperwork available, you cannot help them. That's your boss's fault, not yours. This makes it easy for you to not feel guilty, since your job is to follow da rulez.
How did we get here? Why can you not just give them their pills and charge them the real amount. Why do we need this bureaucratic hell and pretend we're here to help people. We're not. We're here to squeeze you until we cannot legally ask for more.
I can get my drugs from people like this but you can’t because you prefer this system. Having chosen a system with heavy import controls and an overbearing government regulatory agency, all of which you are likely a huge fan of, there’s not much point to being upset that it yields high prices through an opaque system. The thing you want creates the thing you don’t want.
One might as well rage at getting wet when you stand under the shower and turn it on.
The people who pay the most for these systems use them the least, and the people who pay the least for them use them the most.
At best you can have a system where the people paying for it are respected for their contribution (and likewise feel good about it), and the people using it are ever grateful for what their receive (and can shamelessly feel good about it).
But man, have you ever dealt with average humans?
You can, you would just end up without income at best, or charged with a crime and imprisoned at worst.
Also, all these complexities in healthcare exist due to 90% not being able to afford it, so the complexities are to paper over politically unpopular subsidies from various groups of people to other groups of people, in varying amounts. The other part of it is the nebulous costs of liability, that potentially reach into the millions for each interaction.
but, of course, i don't have any choice in the matter, so what's the point of talking about it?
but, of course, we don't have any choice in that matter either, do we?
I don't need blame to swat a mosquito that's trying to live, to remove a cobra from my living room, or to quibble about fine print with someone in such an annoying way that I eventually get what I want.
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.
I believe the primary concern has been while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.
Note that there is a HIPAA approved email service called Direct, as in Direct Messaging / Direct Exchange / Direct Connect.
If everyone had a fax machine such that you'd commonly get a working fax receiver if you mis-entered the recipient's number, then #1 wouldn't be such a big deal. But in reality, if you enter a fax number, and the other end actually answers and responds with a screech, it's extremely likely that you're connected to the right party. (Also, I bet 99% of modern faxing is triggered by a nearby computer, or by pressing one of the preprogrammed speed dial buttons on the fax. There aren't that many opportunities to misdial the number in the first place.)
That second is also a big deal. There are no intermediate servers which may be caching and inappropriately storing the data, except maybe the NSA, but what can ya do. The sender may have a cache, in the form of a print spooler. The receiver may have a cache where it temporarily stores inbound faxes and prints them asynchronously. But since both of those devices are owned and controlled by the parties in the communication, that's not a legal issue.
I'm not advocating for faxes. They're a slow, clunky, lossy, pain in the ass. And yet, they do have specific properties that are pretty sweet. I guess the equivalent would be if I could ask you to send a PDF to my specific IPv6 address, and you could peer-to-peer shoot it directly to me. If I typoed the address at all, it's statistically "unlikely" that another person would be listening on that specific IP a that specific time. And if it were truly P2P, then you and I would be the only 2 who ever touched the file, except maybe the NSA, but what can ya do. Alas, I don't see that replacing fax machines any time soon.
That's not exactly complicated if either party owns a web server. Which - last I checked - the government has.
Just give the person who needs to send the sensitive documents a short link like uploaddocuments.gov, have that page ask for some basic identifying info, and have a box for the user to drag and drop a file. At which point the browser will p2p upload that file over HTTPS.
I don’t love faxes. This isn’t me saying we should keep them forever. We shouldn’t. Still, there are reasons they’re still widely used for medical stuff today. If CMS or HHS rolled out a new method and told doctor’s offices to start using it if they want to get paid, the industry would switch in a heartbeat. Short of that, any other alternative will take approximately forever.
Doesn’t that only apply to covered entities, which the internet is telling me does not include the Social Security Administration.
This is an indictment of email more than anything.
“Hello sir, before we get started, for security measures, please provide this information about your account”
Hmm I dont have this on hand, let me log in to my account and look at the settings and read it verbatim back to you, proving I’m not compromising this user at all
“Thank you, sir!”
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 get that this is exhausting, but the rank-and-file employee is just doing their job. This is like people attacking McDonalds employees because they were out of Szechuan Sauce [0].
The author _clearly_ had a way to accomplish their goal. Why could they not just say "ok that's inconvenient, but I'll just use this online service to send my existing PDF".
[0]: https://www.nme.com/features/tv-features/rick-and-mortys-sze...
And toner? I'd wager that the printer is going to use a print drum. That does have toner inside, but you'd talk about replacing the drum–not running out of toner.
Even consumer drum printers are pretty good nowadays. I have a Brother drum printer, and I wouldn't worry about sending a 500 page job to it if I needed to.
https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/183926/...
So it doesn't inconvenience the "Karen" who is supposedly so evil for (checks notes) following the laws or rules that were implemented by people who were voted into their position.
Unlike in the private sector, public sector employees are often literally constrained by the law. You can personally end up in court if you try to help someone bypass a law. Plenty of government employees DO still end up bending rules.
Karen has zero power. If she did, she wouldn't be talking to assholes on the phone all day every day.
It... doesn't sound like an absurd practice at all. There are curable disabilities. And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology. It sounds about right to review the situation every a few years.
True, but it should be obvious in 99% of cases if a condition is lifelong.
>And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology.
Very rarely tbh.
I can't think of a single lifelong condition that was cured in the last decade.
Even then it should be trivial to only review cases when a cure is available, by searching the database for people with that condition.
Is it? The Author mentions he has degenerated optical nerves from birth, I don't think laser fixes that.
Hep C regimens are getting closer and closer to "take a pill for a couple months" - no more interferon injections or multiple rounds of multiple drugs.
Trikafta is a functional cure for 90% of CF patients, I believe - not easy or cheap but normalizes what you care about bar the administration of the treatment itself.
Sickle cell has CRISPR treatments that are incredibly invasive and awful but do functionally cure the disease more or less permanently for a cool "couple million"
And everyone knows about GLP-1 drugs for obesity. The latest batch are as good or better than bariatric surgery without, you know, the surgery part.
There's also Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that now has a (very expensive) gene therapy: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-10-12/fda-panel-endorses-gene...
This might not be the right frequency, though, and only accepting post/fax is bullshit. Doubly so for short deadlines.
According to the docs linked, there are two forms at play, SSA-454 and SSA-455. The author likely had to have an SSA-455 filled, as his condition is of a "Medical Improvement Not Expected" type (this differentiation does exist). Seems that this needs to be done every 5-7 years.
Both can be filled online apparently though, self-service style (not sure how accessible that is for him though):
https://www.ssa.gov/disability/review
Faxing and physical mail to a specific office seem to be additional options. Doesn't even sound like the fax and mail rule is office specific, seems to be a Social Security Administration originating internal policy.
Am I missing something?
That's not the issue, not sure why you try to steer discussion that way. The issue is, that's not enough to be an asshole and have some respect or general approval for that.
Every Karen making hell for entire neighborhood has some sad story behind, usually series of them and some are properly fucking horrible and heartbreaking to levels where this article reads like great easy chill life. I wish I was kidding, wife is GP and has to do basic psychiatric work too due to lack of available specialist doctors and the stories she hears almost daily... For example the amount of people who experienced sexual abuse as children with lifelong devastating consequences is fucking horribly high, but most go unreported even to close family so not part of any stats.
To condense - this is not enough as an excuse, however harsh the life can be. Thus don't expect that much sympathies. I'd expect a bit higher empathy levels from folks here.
(I'm blind myself.)
The tone is so "I'm smarter than everyone else and I'm dealing with idiots", and it's just incredibly immature.
> to prove that I—a man who has been blind since birth—am, in fact, still blind
Plenty of disabilities can be temporary. And rather than argue about which are permanent and which are temporary and where to draw the line, it's entirely reasonable to ask everyone to just resubmit documentation every 5-7 years.
The author is writing as if "Karen" was coming up with these policies herself, and is choosing to spite her personally. It's incredibly sad. Karen is presumably just a poor woman doing her best to do her job within a system she can't change either. She can't personally make an exception to allow documentation by e-mail. So why on earth would you take all of this out on her?
It's just really sad that this person thinks they're somehow "winning" or "getting back" at the system. They're not helping anything, just spreading misery. Maybe some people read this and think it's a great revenge story or something -- I read it and I just feel pity for the author that they think there's anything good about the way they acted.
I mean, why not take a minute to think about the 30 other people who needed to fax in documentation that day and couldn't, because this one person wanted to jam the machine and use up all its toner. What if the author's sabotage was responsible for other people missing their benefits?
Also, large firms will typically digitize directly into a document management system. It would be no more than 5-15 minutes at most for an experienced reviewer to flip through 500 PDF pages to find current supporting evidence of a medical disability.
Lifelong and degenerative conditions.
They have full access to bank accounts, revoked driving license, direct line to my consultants.
Every form filled, every document provided.
They still call to ask if my genes have fixed themselves.
Not sure what verbal confirmation they're expecting - "no, I made it all up"?
Edit: exact words were "Do you continue to have <REDACTED>" where <REDACTED> is a genetic disease.
Edit edit: I feel sorry for those having to follow these scripts.
(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.)
Or semi-fiction? The author is actually blind and tagged it nonfiction, but I suspect some embellishment.
> but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author.
When I'm frustrated talking with an agent of a big organization, I try to remember they probably didn't set the policy. But I also expect them to express some empathy for how I'm negatively affected by that policy. The author/protagonist, accurately or not, felt the opposite from "Karen from compliance". In their shoes, I wouldn't feel much empathy for Karen in return.
> The spam should go to the person in charge
I also expect the agent to have a closer relationship with "the person in charge" than I do (none whatsoever). If I mention the policy is absurd, they could at least make some effort to pass that along to their manager.
Also, sending the information to the agent is necessary compliance, even if the volume is malicious.
> not the person who is forced to deal with this every day
Maybe they feeling a bit of the pain themselves might make them more likely to speak up. If this becomes a miserable job that no one will stay in, that might provoke a change.
Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good.
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?
(For the sake of argument, I'm going with all the details of the story, including that this caused Karen any distress at all. I think it's more likely a real office like this has a setup for which getting a 500-page fax is no big deal at all. And if it really is a DoS on their processing, the consequence I'd be more worried about is causing acceptance to slow down enough that other disability claims are not processed before their deadline.)
Have you seen how much public sector employees taking calls get paid to be abused all day?
If you want people with limitless wells of compassion, pay better. Public sector jobs generally get to scrape the bottom of the barrel and compete with the local grocery store.
It's not just the faxing that causes people to act the way Karen (supposedly) acted - it's the anger and maliciousness being directed at them by numerous people, all day, every day, even when they do try to be sympathetic to the fact that the system fucks everyone. But there's only so much empathy one can muster.
(Not to mention the various other factors that push good people out of government, such as working for decades to make the systems better only for them to get worse.)
To be clear, I agree with you to an extent; if instead of being malicious and directing anger at the people doing their best to help, people like the author more calmly expressed their frustration with the system, maybe they can bring it up with their superiors, as you said.
All of it's a mess, and not a single facet of this issue is without blame - not the recipients, not the bureaucrats, not the politicians, and certainly not the voters.
[1] A discount that was less than the delta between consumer-class and business-class prices, when the latter doesn't seem to actually be providing better availability lately.
Most of these bureaucrats have more power than what they want to let us think, but that means taking the risk of being told off for having been kind.
I tried to delete my account on GitHub. I could not. The gdpr compliance email address they provide happily accepts emails but my account is still there, after more than 3 months.
Why am I writing this here? To show you an example of being powerless to the system. The only things I can do is things you can call "petty", like wearing a "Microsoft employees deserve Gulag" t-shirt. Since I tried many other options and failed multiple times
If it were India, you have to pay a 'tax', mostly directly to the bureaucrat or using the workflow setup by the bureaucrat -- its another person outside 'taking care' of these things or his security guard/watchman or another low level employee. It can't be done remotely, you have to go to office and figure out the workflow and the right person. Most third world countries have some version of this configuration.
In US, there are lawyers who get you disability, no problem, they take care of everything for you, and take 50%. Millions of people are on fake disability thanks to these kind lawyers.
Ultimately, most people in Govt (politicians/bureaucrats) are entitled to ALL the money that Govt collects (steals?), and they have different ways of collecting their money. This is just human nature. The Trump regime shows the most innovative ways of doing this, it is quite admirable.
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.
Faxes have been "obsolete" a really long time.
What is this about?
I don't know the author, but presumably the blog predates the domain.
Obviously, you can just objectively measure if someone is fully blind. Sure you can pretend, but that's very hard.
On the other hand there's disabilities like anxiety, where the only option is to ask the patient questions that the patient may or may not have already looked up online.
By not splitting the groups you are left with only two very bad options:
A) Everyone gets a regime with a lot checks and rechecks to keep the system affordable and scoped to people who need it.
B) You give everyone a lax, trusty regime that people will immediately start abusing by claiming they have anxiety or so.
No not really. Blindness is a spectrum.
https://www.cnib.ca/en/sight-loss-info/blindness/what-blindn...
Not in my time it didn't. It was thermal paper that grew grey after a while (or a short exposition to direct sunlight); it came in rolls and each page was cut after it was "printed" and fell to the floor where it curled. 500 pages of this would have created a huge, unmanageable mess.
No government workers were harmed.
And that's even without considering the security benefit of not receiving files that could be compromised, instead generating a file from an image stream. (Now I'm trying to picture what a daisy chain of exploits would be needed to craft a malicious Fax.)
My wife and I had many troubles (delays due to additional security checks, endless request for documents) in visa and all immigration-related applications in the US. We cannot even find a government official to complain. Email inquires all end up with boilerplate responses. Many agencies do not have phone services, and even if some do, you are connected to an unhelpful call center worker who can only provide generic info and have no permissions to discuss your problems. And lawyers told us we could do little because all the procedures are legitimate. We may (and we did once in the past) sue the government but only after an "unreasonable" delay, at which point much harm is already caused.
This week the US consulate emailed me to ask for official documents about a minor past civil suit against me in China, including "a police certificate", for my visa application. Why the heck does the US visa have anything to do with a civil suit, and in which country does a civil suit involve police?
Now I wonder if this is fiction, even if the person is real and they are blind.
"and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
That's fair criticism, I didn't forget, I just copy pasted the shortest part that seemed relevant. I added it back in. Thanks for noticing.
It’s a lot less paper to have a pdf of the fax emailed.
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.
So i asked for its number and sent it lots of completely black pictures. The thermal fax did not like that.
Mostly it's because I don't think the SSA employee was malicious at all, although viewed through a lens of bitterness perhaps they could be viewed that way. But the author was unabashedly malicious.
I'm not suggesting that this is any reason to support evil policies but I try to be sympathetic to struggles I may not be aware of.
What I'm trying to say is yeah, she could've taken the risk and stood up and said something. He could've beared the pain and sent the correct documentation. He knows the process by now, he had to have known exactly what he needed to send! And yet he chose to needlessly inflict harm on someone who's choice it wasn't theirs to make. The reality of jobs these days is not a give and take, let's all make the world better by democratizing our decisions type world. It's much much worse.
It doesn't matter what Karen thinks or wants. It doesn't matter if Karen believes the disabled person or not. It doesn't matter if Karen is physically capable of complex thought or not. If Karen breaks the rules for you, you will end up losing your benefits anyway, possibly forced to pay them back, and Karen loses her job.
Public sector employment pays terribly. People don't really do it because they enjoy it.
There is literal law all over that says "This information can't be in an email for privacy reasons". It's not policy, it's law.
Stop harassing low level bureaucrats and learn some damn civics.
Similarly, when I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had zero ability to refund you, to fix a problem, to bend any rule for example to help you with your WIC process, which was utterly miserable. Oh sorry the pamphlet this week says X bread is the only approved one, it doesn't matter that it causes your child GI distress, nobody is allowed to change it.
Vote for people who aren't trying to hurt disabled people and you will have fewer disabled people being hurt. Stop screeching about "Fraud" that doesn't exist if you want it to be easy for people to get the welfare they need.
All attempts to battle fraud will inherently add friction to the process. Find an optimization point that isn't so hostile to human beings.
"He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy endings _and_ nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
the sentence continues after the "and".
it is also tagged "non-fiction" at the top, as other people have noted.
Sure, we can rightly criticize the author for their abuse towards this working class government employee.
But then to some degree we're guilty of what the author is guilty of. We're fighting each other.
Let's focus our outrage on the people who made these rules. And that keep making more rules like them.
Not that we shouldn't have rules to prevent "welfare fraud". But that it's unacceptable for such rules to make it harder to receive benefits that you're entitled to.
And for many of our representatives, making it more difficult to receive benefits isn't just a side effect of bad anti-fraud policy, it's actually the point.
Let's focus our outrage on them and demand change.
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 useful when someone on the other end wants to delay (the equivalent of closing a bug as can't reproduce). This is why governments like faxes and why this story is so unlikely (no chance anyone will call back in that event)
Online fax services that are used by medical or government offices almost always generate digital logs that track when a document was sent, who sent it, and who received it, for regulatory purposes
Yes, I realize there will be cynics who say "The difficulty is by design to deny benefits", but I also think a lot of well meaning policies are hamstrung by the implementation (especially of software). Claude + Code for America can fix this.
https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was also digital.
> I imagined Karen’s fax machine. It was probably an old, beige beast sitting in the corner of a gray office. It was likely low on paper. It was almost certainly low on patience.
I think the rest of the article was also their imagination.
> "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."
People only speak like this in fan-fiction.
And there being an actual printer is even less likely. Even back in 2008, it was almost impossible to find an actual fax machine, even though businesses had fax numbers, they stopped needing machines.
This is the way.
The problem is that it took Karen zero effort to say “we only accept fax”. She doesn’t care about how much effort it takes you you — in fact, as implied, it taking you a tremendous amount of effort actually reduces her effort. In order to make a dent, you have to figure out a way for the idiotic policy to impact the person making and/or enforcing it. That’s the only way it ever changes.
> I opened my preferred internet faxing service. This is a tool that allows me to send a fax purely through digital data. It would cost $20, exactly the amount someone had donated to the blog last week, but if I didn't do this, I would lose all my benifits. It costs me zero paper. It costs me zero toner.
> ...
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.
I doubt it it would actually happen that way. My guess is there's a very high chance that the recipient is also using some kind of internet faxing service. So no actual paper was harmed by this prank.
> Two hours later, my phone rang...
> "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."
Oh yeah. Total fiction. Can't you stop a real fax machine by hanging up the phone? They work with dial-up. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a "cancel print" button.
Porn isn't bad, but thinking that porn adequately reflects reality, or that behavior within porn is blanket appropriate for real life is.. not good.
When you get a certain drone with a certain way of speaking down to you ("this is the system obviously, you faceless person who is just as dumb as all the other faceless people"), then it's infuriating and I can see why OP went to bureaucratic war.
At the same time, give the drone a break. She's doing what she's been trained to do, in the framework she's permitted to operate in, and she's got bigger problems than you.
When I was younger, I went to similar bureaucratic wars to prove a point... to whom? What for?
It's not helping anybody.
I’m a bit surprised they haven’t migrated to digital fax reception a long time ago.
But I have also learned that pissing off bureaucrats can have severe consequences. They may be petty, but some of them (like SSI/Medicaid people) have the power to truly mess up your life.
>For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.
... I assumed that there would simply be a messaging system attached to an OCR at the other end - no physical fax machine
And then near the end of like the 3rd one was text that wasn't cut from the TTS engine... "Claude can make mistakes"
It also appears to be a confession of intentional vandalism of government property, despite the author admitting that they already knew how to send a fax via website, which is as convenient as email.
And, believe it or not, yes, some people do in fact receive treatment that cures a disability.
I’m dealing with IRS right now to get an EIN for an LLC. They won’t give an EIN over online form. Must be faxed or physically mailed.
They say 3-5 days. Been weeks. I pay $5/week to hold onto a fax number.
So Trump spending hundreds of billions on blowing up kids’ schools in Iran and cutting funding from IRS.
Why does it take weeks to start a business in 2026 and get a bank account.
Just absurd.
Probably bad for other disabled too - their faxes wont reach in time.
There is some disability fraud, they have to check.
Maybe stop voting for right wing, so someone changes the system though.
20 years ago I worked for a client that had a fax to exchange connector, any mailbox could send a fax from outlook[2] and they had linked fax numbers to group mailbox so that each department had their own fax numbers.
1 : https://blog.checkpoint.com/security/faxploit-hp-printer-fax... 2 : It was always fun to analyze fax sending errors because someone wanted to send a funny video to a fax number.
I’m being partly facetious, but I have started to hear some theories from likely heterodox psychologists about new scute forms of personality disorder developing, particularly among younger generations. Not sure how much there is to the theory.