8 ms·

Karen woke up this morning in her run down, rented flat. She briefly looks at the collections letter that showed up yesterday due to an unaffordable repair she

Karen woke up this morning in her run down, rented flat. She briefly looks at the collections letter that showed up yesterday due to an unaffordable repair she had to pay for on her credit card. Another letter from her ex-partner's lawyer. As she rushes out the door (she spilled coffee on her one nice sweater, her favorite) her mom flashes through her mind... "What about mum?". She arrives at the office. It is an oppressive, sterile government office. She tries to ignore the overwhelming sense of helplessness and sits down to begin working. Her first call is a person screaming at her about their benefits. She has no power, absolutely no power, to help them due to the rules imposed on her by her superiors, but has to take the abuse regardless and explain the process she has no control over to them. The next call is a case she actually is familiar with: a person claiming to be disabled to collect dole. They aren't, but she has been told that this is a special case and she must work with them. She complies. She sits back in her chair and the phone rings again. An upset person on the other end... "I have the documents in PDF format"

fainpul 7mo ago
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.
- recursivedoubts 7mo ago
  i don't believe that to be the case at all 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?
  - fainpul 7mo ago
    right
  - forshaper 7mo ago
    I don't need blame to hunt an animal for food or slam someone who's biting me. 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.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  This. There's something about most cultures that I am slowly am realizing; we always know how to complain and shift the responsibility. And no, you're not immune to this. You're not immune to anything, really. 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.
  - s5300 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    > Why can you not just give them their pills and charge them the real amount. 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.
  - renewiltord 7mo ago
    > 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 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.
    - 7mo ago
- spicyusername 7mo ago
  never blame anyone for anything That's actually not quite true. 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.
  - fainpul 7mo ago
    I agree with you, except for the blame part. 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.
    - foxglacier 7mo ago
      That already happened is key to your idea and I think you'd have got a better response if you included it initially. It's actually quite a worthwhile concept. Blame can't change the past. The important reason we blame is to help our mind cope with the loss we suffered. But if you can succeed in coping by thinking the past is immutable, that's even better.
- justonceokay 7mo ago
  If you think there’s no free will then you won’t argue with me when I say I think there is.
  - pavel_lishin 7mo ago
    But they will argue with you, for it was predestined.
    - scrollop 7mo ago
      Unless you have an Out of Body Experience and who the hell knows if physics continues to be at all having an effect in that realm and thus perform Free Will is a possibility.
wholinator2 7mo ago
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
- john_strinlai 7mo ago
  >then laughed at her anguish. 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.
  - mothballed 7mo ago
    This is exactly how it's handled from my limited dealings with the machine. Literally no one gives a shit if you make their job 'harder.' They have an endless treadmill of things to do. Whether it's your 500 page fax or 500 people with a 1 page fax is of no consequence to them. They will work at the same pace either way. In fact their boss might like it because they can try to use it to argue for more headcount which is one of the ways to gain more prestige/power for the managers. 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.
stavros 7mo ago
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.
- RobotToaster 7mo ago
  "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." - Sir William Blackstone, 1760. It's amazing how we still haven't learnt that.
justonceokay 7mo ago
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
cucumber3732842 7mo ago
"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.
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]
- aerodexis 7mo ago
  and likewise, "hate the cogs" takes are equally worthless. All nuance is lost, the cycle repeats again.
- Permit 7mo ago
  > 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?
  - rogerrogerr 7mo ago
    Cogs receiving abuse (which in this case is a scary word for "feedback from the public who is paying you and is unhappy with your process") _do_ cause the system to change. It's really not that much different from writing angry letters to Congressmen: 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.
renewiltord 7mo ago
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.
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago
  The people saying "how dare you hurt that ablative layer" are no less evil than those implementing it IMO.
voidUpdate 7mo ago
> "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."
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- iso1631 7mo ago
  This experiment feels related https://theinquisitivejournal.com/2023/04/07/the-power-of-perception-lessons-from-the-scar-experiment-the-inquisitive-journal/ 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.
  - voidUpdate 7mo ago
    Perhaps Karen was made of marshmallow and worked at the cookie factory. We don't know. All we know is that the author says she was uncaring and unapologetic while asking a blind person with cerebral palsy to either fax or mail documents to them instead of sending them in the format they were already in
- bmicraft 7mo ago
  The author may feel like this is true, but she probably probably doesn't care for the Kafkaesque nature of the system and doesn't stand to profit from their misery either.
- niuzeta 7mo ago
SomaticPirate 7mo ago
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
- pjc50 7mo ago
  > There should be a political call to action here A real problem in both benefits claiming and immigration systems is that there are voters on the other side loudly demanding that the system be made more hostile and kafkaesque.
  - ryandrake 7mo ago
    Yea, it's a mistake to think everyone wants things to be better, and that we just need to organize. There is a huge, motivated voting block out there who want to make things worse, at least worse for people unlike themselves, and they are organized and fighting back (and usually winning).
  - egorfine 7mo ago
    And bear in mind that there are quite a few politicians willing to monetize that by actually implementing those more hostile and kafkaesque rules.
stuaxo 7mo ago
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.
- jotux 7mo ago
  >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.
  - WJW 7mo ago
    And unless enough bureaucrats complain to their boss, that law will never change. Regulations don't get handed down from the gods or something, they can be changed if enough people want it. There are plenty of countries these days where a PDF is enough.
raincole 7mo ago
> 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.
- mothballed 7mo ago
  Depends on what kind of dole you are on. Unemployment isn't terribly difficult. Disability is nigh impossible. Took a decade for one of my family members to get it. From what I've seen they want to see you're broke and jobless for a very long time before they will believe you.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  Really? Are you sure? 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.
  - raincole 7mo ago
    I didn't say there is no compliance hurdles or the benefits are supposed to be easy to get. 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.
lenkite 7mo ago
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.
madethemcry 7mo ago
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/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
master-lincoln 7mo ago
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...
- recursivedoubts 7mo ago
  man
mmcwilliams 7mo ago
Seems potentially libelous to claim this person isn't actually blind.
- phyzome 7mo ago
  I don't think that's what they meant -- they're describing a series of three imaginary phone calls. (I did misread it that way at first, though.)
- recursivedoubts 7mo ago
  read it again
jollyllama 7mo ago
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.
- recursivedoubts 7mo ago
  “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
FatherOfCurses 7mo ago
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.
- niuzeta 7mo ago
  > I always try to say to the person helping me "I know you are not the person responsible for my issue." This simple sentence that shows empathy to the person on the other side of the line is so profound. In a single breath you let the other person be heard, be seen, and appreciated. At the worst, it makes you stand out amongst all the abusive asshats they interact with day to day. It makes them want to help you. I've used this line every time I had to deal with a customer service agent and the voice always softened after that. A simple "thank you", or "take your time" seem to mark you as a person, rather than a case to close.
  - FatherOfCurses 7mo ago
    Thanks. I don't want to take any credit for coming up with it organically. I have worked in several service roles throughout my life, and have gotten first-hand exposure to how upstream decisions impact consumers and service workers. I like to kid myself that in this crappy world it's one of the few powers I have left.
James_K 7mo ago
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.
chaseadam17 7mo ago
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.
charles_f 7mo ago
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".
- thomascountz 7mo ago
  This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should. Concluding she had permission and agency suggests she had intrinsic motivation to not apply that agency. If we assume the motivation is nefarious, then the main character is the victim. However, quite more likely, she is also a victim of the system, whereby were she to apply her discretionary agency to reduce the burden on the main character, she takes on an equal or greater burden herself. Once the burden had already shifted onto her, she accepted that she doesn't have any options to prevent it.
z3c0 7mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banner
stackghost 7mo ago
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.
- egorfine 7mo ago
  > sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly. This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.
robofanatic 7mo ago
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.
laszlojamf 7mo ago
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.
tliltocatl 7mo ago
If you are being paid for making people's lives miserable, expect some misery in return. That's how it is.
ludicrousdispla 7mo ago
...later, as evening approached, she called her sales rep at Dunder-Mifflin to place an order for a case of US Letter Thermal Printer Paper rolls.

fainpul 7mo ago

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.

recursivedoubts 7mo ago
i don't believe that to be the case at all 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?
- fainpul 7mo ago
  right
- forshaper 7mo ago
  I don't need blame to hunt an animal for food or slam someone who's biting me. 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.
ramon156 7mo ago
This. There's something about most cultures that I am slowly am realizing; we always know how to complain and shift the responsibility. And no, you're not immune to this. You're not immune to anything, really. 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.
- s5300 7mo ago
  [dead]
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
  > Why can you not just give them their pills and charge them the real amount. 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.
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - 7mo ago
spicyusername 7mo ago
never blame anyone for anything That's actually not quite true. 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.
- fainpul 7mo ago
  I agree with you, except for the blame part. 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.
  - foxglacier 7mo ago
    That already happened is key to your idea and I think you'd have got a better response if you included it initially. It's actually quite a worthwhile concept. Blame can't change the past. The important reason we blame is to help our mind cope with the loss we suffered. But if you can succeed in coping by thinking the past is immutable, that's even better.
justonceokay 7mo ago
If you think there’s no free will then you won’t argue with me when I say I think there is.
- pavel_lishin 7mo ago
  But they will argue with you, for it was predestined.
  - scrollop 7mo ago
    Unless you have an Out of Body Experience and who the hell knows if physics continues to be at all having an effect in that realm and thus perform Free Will is a possibility.

wholinator2 7mo ago

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

john_strinlai 7mo ago
>then laughed at her anguish. 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.
- mothballed 7mo ago
  This is exactly how it's handled from my limited dealings with the machine. Literally no one gives a shit if you make their job 'harder.' They have an endless treadmill of things to do. Whether it's your 500 page fax or 500 people with a 1 page fax is of no consequence to them. They will work at the same pace either way. In fact their boss might like it because they can try to use it to argue for more headcount which is one of the ways to gain more prestige/power for the managers. 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.

stavros 7mo ago

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.

RobotToaster 7mo ago
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." - Sir William Blackstone, 1760. It's amazing how we still haven't learnt that.

justonceokay 7mo ago

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

cucumber3732842 7mo ago

"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.

cindyllm 7mo ago
[dead]
aerodexis 7mo ago
and likewise, "hate the cogs" takes are equally worthless. All nuance is lost, the cycle repeats again.
Permit 7mo ago
> 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?
- rogerrogerr 7mo ago
  Cogs receiving abuse (which in this case is a scary word for "feedback from the public who is paying you and is unhappy with your process") _do_ cause the system to change. It's really not that much different from writing angry letters to Congressmen: 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.

renewiltord 7mo ago

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.

cucumber3732842 7mo ago
The people saying "how dare you hurt that ablative layer" are no less evil than those implementing it IMO.

voidUpdate 7mo ago

> "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."

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
iso1631 7mo ago
This experiment feels related https://theinquisitivejournal.com/2023/04/07/the-power-of-perception-lessons-from-the-scar-experiment-the-inquisitive-journal/ 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.
- voidUpdate 7mo ago
  Perhaps Karen was made of marshmallow and worked at the cookie factory. We don't know. All we know is that the author says she was uncaring and unapologetic while asking a blind person with cerebral palsy to either fax or mail documents to them instead of sending them in the format they were already in
bmicraft 7mo ago
The author may feel like this is true, but she probably probably doesn't care for the Kafkaesque nature of the system and doesn't stand to profit from their misery either.
niuzeta 7mo ago

SomaticPirate 7mo ago

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

pjc50 7mo ago
> There should be a political call to action here A real problem in both benefits claiming and immigration systems is that there are voters on the other side loudly demanding that the system be made more hostile and kafkaesque.
- ryandrake 7mo ago
  Yea, it's a mistake to think everyone wants things to be better, and that we just need to organize. There is a huge, motivated voting block out there who want to make things worse, at least worse for people unlike themselves, and they are organized and fighting back (and usually winning).
- egorfine 7mo ago
  And bear in mind that there are quite a few politicians willing to monetize that by actually implementing those more hostile and kafkaesque rules.

stuaxo 7mo ago

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.

jotux 7mo ago
>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.
- WJW 7mo ago
  And unless enough bureaucrats complain to their boss, that law will never change. Regulations don't get handed down from the gods or something, they can be changed if enough people want it. There are plenty of countries these days where a PDF is enough.

raincole 7mo ago

> 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.

mothballed 7mo ago
Depends on what kind of dole you are on. Unemployment isn't terribly difficult. Disability is nigh impossible. Took a decade for one of my family members to get it. From what I've seen they want to see you're broke and jobless for a very long time before they will believe you.
pjc50 7mo ago
Really? Are you sure? 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.
- raincole 7mo ago
  I didn't say there is no compliance hurdles or the benefits are supposed to be easy to get. 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.

lenkite 7mo ago

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.

madethemcry 7mo ago

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

master-lincoln 7mo ago

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...

recursivedoubts 7mo ago
man

mmcwilliams 7mo ago

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

phyzome 7mo ago
I don't think that's what they meant -- they're describing a series of three imaginary phone calls. (I did misread it that way at first, though.)
recursivedoubts 7mo ago
read it again

jollyllama 7mo ago

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.

recursivedoubts 7mo ago
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

FatherOfCurses 7mo ago

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.

niuzeta 7mo ago
> I always try to say to the person helping me "I know you are not the person responsible for my issue." This simple sentence that shows empathy to the person on the other side of the line is so profound. In a single breath you let the other person be heard, be seen, and appreciated. At the worst, it makes you stand out amongst all the abusive asshats they interact with day to day. It makes them want to help you. I've used this line every time I had to deal with a customer service agent and the voice always softened after that. A simple "thank you", or "take your time" seem to mark you as a person, rather than a case to close.
- FatherOfCurses 7mo ago
  Thanks. I don't want to take any credit for coming up with it organically. I have worked in several service roles throughout my life, and have gotten first-hand exposure to how upstream decisions impact consumers and service workers. I like to kid myself that in this crappy world it's one of the few powers I have left.

James_K 7mo ago

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.

chaseadam17 7mo ago

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.

charles_f 7mo ago

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".

thomascountz 7mo ago
This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should. Concluding she had permission and agency suggests she had intrinsic motivation to not apply that agency. If we assume the motivation is nefarious, then the main character is the victim. However, quite more likely, she is also a victim of the system, whereby were she to apply her discretionary agency to reduce the burden on the main character, she takes on an equal or greater burden herself. Once the burden had already shifted onto her, she accepted that she doesn't have any options to prevent it.

z3c0 7mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banner

stackghost 7mo ago

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.

egorfine 7mo ago
> sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly. This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.

robofanatic 7mo ago

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.

laszlojamf 7mo ago

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.

tliltocatl 7mo ago

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

ludicrousdispla 7mo ago

...later, as evening approached, she called her sales rep at Dunder-Mifflin to place an order for a case of US Letter Thermal Printer Paper rolls.