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Sounds like it's not real but... It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally, rather than the rules and constraints that employee is forc
by tyingq 6mo ago
Sounds like it's not real but...
It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally, rather than the rules and constraints that employee is forced to use.
Probably fair to comment on the interaction, whether the person was rude, and so on. But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing.
- hrimfaxi 6mo agoThe person is an agent of the system. That they bear the brunt of the reaction is the system working as intended.
- tyingq 6mo agoI guess. Faxing it to someone involved in why the rules are that way would be more satisfying to me.
- madaxe_again 6mo agoYou can fax your congressman.
- miki123211 6mo agoI, as a user with 10k+ karma on HN, can testify that the author has all the hallmarks of a real blind person (active in blind communities and so on). I don't have any evidence suggesting that the author ever engaged in deceptive behavior. In other words, my P(real) > 0.99.
- tyingq 6mo agoSure. He's real. ̶̶̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶:̶ "Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay, obscure writer. He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy ending..." Edit: Yep, appears I have it wrong. Thanks for the pointers. The non-fiction tag missed my eye.
- latexr 6mo agoThis specific post is tagged “nonfiction” and “rant”, though. Writers of fiction often write nonfiction too. Douglas Adams, David Foster Wallace, Harlan Ellison, …, all wrote journalism pieces.
- john_strinlai 6mo agolet me finish the rest of the sentence for you, which somehow got deleted from your clipboard. weird bug! "and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational." extra weird, because you are the third person that has experienced this bug where you can only paste the first half of that exact sentence.
- jerf 6mo agoI don't have a word for this, but this falls under the class of things where even if the author who wrote this is did not personally do this and is making it up, it has absolutely 100% happened somewhere, many times over. For example, it's the same for the DailyWTF... I remember how that would be posted here or on a programming reddit and half the comments would be about how it hadn't happened, and you know, maybe whoever wrote those particular words is just making it up, but I've seen enough just in my little tiny slice of human behavior phase space to know that either the story or something indistinguishably close to it most certainly has happened somewhere, at some time.
- Barbing 6mo agoRepresentative? Believe that or “representation” is used in marketing, like for renders. This cannot be the best word…
- cucumber3732842 6mo ago>It reads like an indictment of the government employee personality in general, and the rules and constraints that employee is forced to use. Fixed that for you. That's how it should read. Not only is the system questionable in a "the bricks may be individual defensible but the road goes right to hell" way but the kind of people such a system first creates (nobody signs up to be a cop just to strangle black guys over 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.
- InsideOutSanta 6mo agoYeah, this anger is entirely misplaced. I don't think this woman is happy to have to enforce this idiotic law and listen to angry people all day long. It's the politicians that people like us elected because they promised to cut wasteful spending, so now blind people have to prove they're still blind once a year. We did that to them.
- dwedge 6mo ago> Yeah, this anger is entirely misplaced. I don't think this woman is happy to have to enforce this idiotic law and listen to angry people all day long 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
- iso1631 6mo agoNobody enjoys working in a call centre
- tryauuum 6mo agoI enjoyed it, although it was not an ISP call center with humongous amount of callers... Maybe 50 percent of the time in the office you were talking
- dwedge 6mo agoThis is a bit of a strawman. Not all customer facing roles are call centres, and not all bureaucracy actually comes from above. 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.
- raybb 6mo agoSeems like something DOGE should have tackled early if they actually cared about making the government effecient. I guess making the lives of the disabled easier isn't flashy enough.
- aetch 6mo agoDOGE was meant to do the opposite
- unsupp0rted 6mo agoIt is and should be an indictment of the employee personally only in the sense that the employee's tone and manner likely conveyed to OP that she thinks of him as a pothole or a buzzing fly: something you have to deal with, rather than someone who needs to be helped. Not that she has any power to help him really. I would guess OP is more upset by the dehumanization in her tone, rather than the dehumanization of the system she works within.
- ryandrake 6mo agoI don't know if this is the case for this story, but some people who have pre-existing chips on their shoulder tend to interpret other people's lack of cooperation as "rudeness" or "annoyance." When someone doesn't bend over backwards to help them, that person ends up being described as "rude" when the story gets told.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- James_K 6mo agoShe could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.
- create_accounts 6mo agoI hate it when bureaucrats ask me to send e-mails because they are not encrypted. Specially my ID. It's a security risk, indeed
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- sl-1 6mo agoNot end to end encrypted? I'd wager most email traffic is encrypted while in transit, but of course that depends on the service providers. And it does sit unencrypted when stored.
- hunterpayne 6mo agoIf you are emailing from a Yahoo address to a GMail address, I would bet it is. If it is going to some .gov address, who knows...maybe...maybe not???
- subscribed 6mo agoEasy to check if you were curious. telnet to the mail server on the relevant port, either ssl, or TLS, or stattls. You'll know :)
- idontwantthis 6mo agoThe most unreal part is Karen calling him back. I never get called back by anyone in any office anymore.
- nickff 6mo agoI've heard this justification many times, but it's highly questionable. Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis; is this morally justifiable? What if their 'job description' does not include 'murder', but they do indeed have to murder an innocent person each month because of the 'rules and constraints'? What if instead of occasional murder, they just have to subject many innocent people to suffering because of 'the rules and constraints'?
- idle_zealot 6mo agoThis isn't a hypothetical, you're just describing social murder. What do people do about it? Usually shower the perpetrators with money and peace prizes.
- autoexec 6mo ago> Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis; 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.
- UltraSane 6mo agoThat is war.
- something765478 6mo agoFollowing your organization's data security practices is not immoral. To me, refusing to accept a PDF is no different than running a cash only store and refusing to accept credit cards as payment.
- hunterpayne 6mo agoAnd how long would that store stay open with such a policy? That's the problem. The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less. Its hard to believe it is just the bureaucrats. I think the leaders of those parts of the government didn't get their posts from merit. And they have no idea just how bad they are at their jobs. It also is probably a bit of too many cooks in the kitchen too.
- GlenTheMachine 6mo ago“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally” As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
- BloondAndDoom 6mo agoThis has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude
- watwut 6mo agoBut we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not. They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.
- evanjrowley 6mo agoAgree that this is a very messy situation. Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention. Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.
- observationist 6mo agoPeople given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, 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.
- wyldfire 6mo ago> blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. 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.
- edwcross 6mo agoIndeed. If Karen from Compliance cared, she could (and should) inform her superiors of what just happened. Let them know how much their procedure cost, in time and money. Call the IT people and say "I have a fax machine printing 500 pages". Get it noted somewhere. Reported. Make statistics out of it. It can be as simple as an e-mail. Or she can send the entire stack of pages as a souvenir. If she cannot be bothered to do anything about it, then maybe it's not such a problem for her after all. But keeping silent about it, is being complicit.
- ccorcos 6mo ago> But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing. Perhaps it's irrational, but I have this viceral feeling that refuses to allow me to believe that people don't have agency. Who is her manager? Tell them how stupid this is! When they say "there's nothing I can do about it", then talk to their manager! I recently left Chase bank due to this same kind of helpless attitude they have toward you. And then they ask "have I addressed all of your problems today?" lol
- kelnos 6mo agoYou have a choice when it comes to where you do your banking. You don't have a choice when it comes to where you get your disability benefits. Chase knows this, and while many of their employees may not be empowered to go off script, the bank sees when people leave, and often does hear what those employees have to say when it comes to customer complaints. The mid-level bureaucrat at the disability office doesn't care about any of that, because they have a monopoly on what they do. You either work with them on their terms, or you don't get what you need.