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

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".

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

> She was talking to a blind man living below the poverty line. She assumed that "fax it" was an impossible hurdle. She assumed I would have to find a ride to a library, pay twenty cents a page, and struggle with a physical machine I couldn't read. She was counting on the friction of the physical world to make me give up.

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.

Great point. I was originally in favor of the fax barrage because I've also been frustrated navigating bureaucracy but you made me reconsider.

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.

It's her inconvenience vs money he relies on to live.

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.

What makes you think this is about her? It makes no difference in her job (I assume) if things go smoothly or not. It needs to hurt the operational procedures so it reaches people in power to change the rules to be meaningful. What makes a fax more secure than an email?

Also how could she just decide that the disability status is accepted without checking the documents. That is just fraud...

Exactly! Whenever I feel offended by someone, I remind myself of David Foster Wallace's message in "This is Water." It's become a positive reflex for me, one that safes me from a rush of aggression as we all know it. However, I still find myself cursing fiercely in my car from time to time, it's just a stronger reflex, it releases some energy and I know I'm hurting nobody anyway

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

The lesson is obviously to have an ablative layer of suffering people strapped to the front of your organization. No one can fight you without hurting them so you are invincible.

It’s commonly practiced and we can see why.

But hopefully erratic behavior of such callers may actually bring some change because Karen is definitely going to complain about him once the manager asks why the fax machine is down.

If you are being paid for making people's lives miserable, expect some misery in return. That's how it is.

We don't have to assume there is a good guy in the story. The resulting piece that the author made, due to the vitriolic tone, is not qualitatively different than a troll post designed to paint the disabled as stunted and bitter.

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.

to be fair, if the author is truthful in his description of this Karen it sounds more like somebody who uses whatever leverage they have to make other people miserable. Did you see Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? Those people exist in real life too.

It seems Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil" has culturally diminished over time. The sentiment you're pushing is the very basis for Sergeant Shultz's character in Hogan's Heroes[1]. It also doesn't change the lack of any route towards a higher-up, so the tired "they're just an employee" defense really doesn't matter when, for all intents and purposes, that employee is the only way for the author to interact with the bureaucracy they're (very obviously) being ushered through with zero concern for the high-stakes outcome.

In short, the answer to complacency isn't "more complacency".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banner

I'm with you that TFA comes off as mean spirited and needlessly so.

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.

Working for an organisation which systematically abuses and degrades disabled people is not a morally neural act. If you're life is difficult then that's sad, but not an excuse to exact that difficulty 100 fold on other people.

It is more important that actually disabled people can easily collect assistance than that we catch fraudsters, though I suspect the US, as a culture, has a different opinion.

"cut those cops strangling that guy over bootleg smokes some slack, they have a tough job"

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.

> "She said it with a challenge in her tone. She knew who she was talking to. She was talking to a blind man living below the poverty line. She assumed that "fax it" was an impossible hurdle. She assumed I would have to find a ride to a library, pay twenty cents a page, and struggle with a physical machine I couldn't read. She was counting on the friction of the physical world to make me give up."

Seems potentially libelous to claim this person isn't actually blind.

In all probability, Karen is a ruthless bureaucrat who has been told to cut down on disability payments and has been assigned to her position so that she may perform the job of trimming the budget so that the local congressman can "donate" to industry.

Everybody is formed by their experiences and genes and they act accordingly. There is no free will. If you realize that, you realize that you can never blame anyone for anything, because they had no choice to act differently. As a customer it's still hard to take, when someone who is clearly formed by years of professional deformation, treats you like shit.