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.
“ 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…
I'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'?
This 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.
> 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.
I, as a user with 10k+ karma on HN, can testify that the author has all the hallmarks of a real blind person (active in blind communities and so on). I don't have any evidence suggesting that the author ever engaged in deceptive behavior.
Sure. He's real. ̶̶̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶:̶
"Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay, obscure writer. He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy ending..."
Edit: Yep, appears I have it wrong. Thanks for the pointers. The non-fiction tag missed my eye.
This 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.
I don't have a word for this, but this falls under the class of things where even if the author who wrote this is did not personally do this and is making it up, it has absolutely 100% happened somewhere, many times over.
For example, it's the same for the DailyWTF... I remember how that would be posted here or on a programming reddit and half the comments would be about how it hadn't happened, and you know, maybe whoever wrote those particular words is just making it up, but I've seen enough just in my little tiny slice of human behavior phase space to know that either the story or something indistinguishably close to it most certainly has happened somewhere, at some time.
It is and should be an indictment of the employee personally only in the sense that the employee's tone and manner likely conveyed to OP that she thinks of him as a pothole or a buzzing fly: something you have to deal with, rather than someone who needs to be helped.
Not that she has any power to help him really. I would guess OP is more upset by the dehumanization in her tone, rather than the dehumanization of the system she works within.
I 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.
> 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.
Seems 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.
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. 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.
> 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
"From a shallow perspective it seems true, but in my experience bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy"
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?
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.
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.
The only experience I can have is personal. In my experience of dealing with and working with them, only those that I've had experience with.
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.
"Assuming that it's a preconception and not observed is a bizarre assumption."
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.
This 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.
> 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."
>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.
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 agree wholeheartedly! This is exactly what i was thinking the entire time. Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in? Will the 0.5% uptick in toner cost for the year cause the administration to rethink their requirements? He's just taken the immense weight and pain he holds for this process, undeservedly, and placed it upon another undeserving person, then laughed at her anguish.
Yes, life is hard, but surely we can bear our troubles in a way that don't make others harder to bear. Or at least aim your troubles at someone who has any power at all to change things! Find a better way to fight the system, that isn't just stabbing other people trapped in the box with you
I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree.
You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.
I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.
I find it far more effective to make friends with and be kind to that employee, and then describe how I know it isn't their fault but this one aspect of the thing that their company does really sucks, right? They're then able to carry that specific complaint from one of their best customers up the chain.
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.
> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
These huge businesses and huge governments are too big for one person at the bottom of the totem pole to make a difference. Sure, they may share 1/N of the culpability for what their organization is doing, but if they rage quit, they will be immediately replaced with another body. The organization won't even notice it.
Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
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.
That's a fun fantasy, but I think in my case it would lead to disappointment. I regularly imagine that I sowed the seed to cause X thing to take off in Y community, but it's going to turn out that it was just the zeitgeist operating every time, and the true role of my mind in influencing others is only that of a conduit, or sewer.
The French Revolution didn't just happen spontaneously from individuals acting individually. You need leadership and coordinated action to change things. A small number of individuals acting individually, yet pushing in the same direction, will never move a needle.
Eh, it has an impact. It's not always obvious but it adds up over time. Use your analogy of choice: slowly building up pressure until it boils over or a small pebble starting an avalanche or whatever works for you.
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.
Nope. It’s like thinking you can overthrow the government by littering. It’s just being lame. If you’re going to be lame to other people, don’t gloat about your lameness online. “If everybody littered, they’d have to do something about it!”
It's needlessly generating excessive amounts of trash and waste. It's wasting tax money. It's hurting the next blind person who won't be able to fax his documents because the machine is down/overloaded. It does not show why fax is stupid. It shows that faxing reams of unnecessary paperwork is stupid. It does not show that they should accept PDFs over email (genuinely a great way to get hacked). There is no benefit in trying to DoS the SSA office.
You kind of missed my point but that's OK. You can agree with or disagree with the action OP took, I'm not making a judgement call on that.
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.
What's missing is coordination. Coordinated individuals taking actions together can change things. But just relying on individuals stochastically, randomly acting doesn't work. You can't random-walk your way to political change, even if a lot of people are random-walking in one direction.
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...
They're still doing business. Every single day. With hundreds of billions in revenue and an increasing number of stores popping up all over the place. Impact can be non-zero and still be not enough to meaningfully change anything.
> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
Absolutely agree. Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans. They need to get bitten sometimes.
> Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans.
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.
No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
And also, they are not supposed to use their intuitive ideas about what is and what is not dangerous use of software. When they do use their intuitive ideas, hacks happen. Karen here doing what she was told and accepting only formats that her organization security team told her to do is Karen doing the correct thing.
We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us. And we are all paid way more then Karen, but are the first to call Karen an idiot when the hack happens. Karen does not know why pdf is different from doc or whatever. Nor is she required to know.
I highly doubt it. Not accepting PDF files from random email addresses that send to your very publicly listed email address is a smart policy. One angry jerk trying to DoS the fax machine is not going to change the policy. At best, it'd cause them to ditch the paper and toner and upgrade so that all incoming faxes are automatically scanned and sent to an email box.
> We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us.
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.
And how does the author (or you) know she doesn't keep raising this?
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
>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
I disagree. I'm sorry Karen here needs to bear the brunt, but if this kept up, at some point Karen's boss will take notice, And then it moves up the chain to someone who can affect that policy.
Companies purposefully set us up to communicate bottom-up, so we can either play the game or break the law.
>People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us
No, it'd be a policy maker or CEO who thinks we're in the 90's and that secure email documentation isn't a thing. "We" could suggest so many ways to handle it that would save costs while being more secure. We're not much higher on the totem pole than Karen.
Yet suddenly, we get these incidents and our bosses are suddenly rushing to IT to find a solution. As if 6 months of deliberation wasn't enough.
> 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.
I sorta feel there's as much fantasy on the other side. The situation as is—the concrete one we're discussing here—exists. You're voting for a version where this person doesn't complain through the methods designed for it and instead writes to the CEO or something and has things fixed that way. Or possibly just doesn't complain about being screwed at all.
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.
If the author didn't abuse the fax, why would anyone notice the process was broken. It's only by abusing the existing process that change will be triggered.
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.
I'm open to options. Not doomerism "the system can't be fixed" mentality. I don't like to think of myself as combative. Ideally we get listened to in council and they properly pull what strings are needed to help.
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.
> 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.
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.
>your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.
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.
This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
> This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
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/.
The Bible of course also says "if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and
cast it from thee", which is where I thought you were going with this at first. The Bible says a lot of things.
It's tricky, because _sometimes_ they do. And the system doesn't give you guidance on whether you're talking to someone who (officially or not) can change the process. So, based mostly on our personality, we all push a different amount before giving up.
Relatable example: I needed to schedule a Pediatric appointment, her assigned Dr was on vacation, and the first receptionist stonewalled on switching Drs within the practice. The second one did it in 2m on her side and guided me to updating insurance in 2m on my side.
Another similar example: Since it's tax time, I had to call a us gov office with a question. The first rep claimed "their system was down" and couldn't help me. I hung up and called back. The second rep was just nasty and stonewalled me by inundating me with security questions and refusing to "verify" my identity, so I eventually hung up and called back a third time. The third rep answered my question within a few minutes, and was a thorough pleasure to deal with.
I mean, I get that these guys might not be getting paid, with the government shutdown tomfoolery, but come on!
As an alternate framing, with the paperwork be giving her what she needs to go to her boss and escalate, and their boss as needed - the paperwork as a magic ticket for everyone to advocate.
To qualify that, the fax is a limited resource, and I'd be concerned about how what other things the fax might be needed for to help other people in a timely manner...
Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens.
The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online (https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm), which I found after following the link in the first sentence.
The form is an embedded iFrame from "Adobe Acrobat Sign", supposedly pure Javascript . It would be a bigger story if this form were not accessible to the disabled.
The form includes a place to attach two PDF, text, or image formats. "Attachments are limited to 5MB and 25 pages".
The post dated March 25 2026 says "This week, I received The Letter."
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.
Other responders have replied well, so I will offer a slight augmentation: Yes, this is bad outcome for the bureaucrat, through no mistake of her own. A wrong has been committed against her - but not by the author - by her employer, and the system which employs her and sets these regulations. They cannot (Although they will if asked) claim ignorance or innocence: It is their fault alone for this experience.
In this case the problem can't easily be blamed on "the system". Government benefits are this way because politicians have for years blamed "benefit cheats" and "welfare queens" and other boogymen, people have voted based on this, and now the law is you have to prove you're still congenitally blind every year. The system is working, it's actually doing what the politicians and their voters want.
I also been on the customer service side and it's really annoying getting angry persona after angry person trying to push their frustrations on you for something you have no control.
Oh, me too. I started out as tech support for a dial up ISP in the 90s. It was rough. I am always polite to customer service. I just feel like it wasn't the lady that was attacked so much as it was the fax machine, the policy, the institution. She had some frustration, but it sounds like he was even polite to her, Didn't yell, didn't call her names or anything. He just opted for malicious compliance.
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.
This isn't a happy counterargument or anything, but (bad as it is) this is this person's job. Or rather it is the job. Their employer has customer service in order for it to buffer—in a cost efficient way—the one or many layers of people above this person from their (profitable) bad policies. It's a punching bag. And it's that because bad policy + punching bag is more profitable than good policy. It might even be the business/market. If the frustrating call leads to 50% of callers giving up (or not calling at all) and just paying something they might not owe, that's a nice net ROI. You might build a business around that, one that wouldn’t have the margins otherwise. You get the callers caving because they feel bad yelling at the unfortunate employees, meanwhile it's in the company's formal protocol to only correct it (or escalate the ticket to someone who could) after the customer has yelled long enough.
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.
I file this under " don't be a dick, especially to the disabled". You wonder why most bankers avoid a lot of this, despite handling one of the most stressful aspect of modern humanity? It's becsuse they tend to be thr friendliest talkers out there. They know the reputation and trust of the banking system is what keeps their money in. They can be just as slimy as a used car salesman in tactics, but we're still interfacing with a human, and humans generally like to feel like they matter.
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.
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.
exactly this. I didn't put you in a bad job; you - and to a large extent, your society - did. 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. but if you pick up a phone to talk to a client or customer, you are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such. fix you mind to understand that people are trying to find the right things to say to you to get what they need at that moment. no different from someone putting in quarters to get a soda from a vending machine. I do X, I get Y. if there is a breakdown in getting Y, I will try other things beyond X. so, in this example, I tried to be reasonable; I tried to make this simple for me while simultaneously making it simple for both you and the machine you are representing. if it is the machine that prevents you from accepting that simplicity, then explain as much as they let you, apologize like a human being for the failings of the machine you represent, and ignore literally all of the rest of it. you can only do what you can do. they can only get what they can get. 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. if you're a real superstar, take note of the specific situation and place it somewhere you can provide a collection of specific situations for review.
> if you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine
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.
Spoken from the pretty obvious position of never having to have worked a low-wage people facing job.
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".
The employee didn't mistreat anyone. She simply stated the procedure (which sucks!).
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.
lol. stopped reading after your first line because I've worked every low-wage, customer facing job you can imagine. shoe salesman, phone rep for verizon and then t mobile and then at&t, fast food, local diner waitstaff, office receptionist, contract installer, HVAC repair, cable service tech. that's a truncated list. I have the opinions I have because I've had those jobs, not in spite of them. I know how I carried myself, and it was a very low bar to reach. it's only when people don't reach that bar that I raise issue. because the bar is "know where you are, know what you can do, know what you can't do, and be as accommodating and responsive to the client/customer as you possibly can be, given your constraints." doesn't feel onerous to me. and in this specific case, I don't even have a problem with karen, per se. at least not from the content of the story. my reply was in response to other people insisting that karen needs to be coddled because all she did was answer a phone and this horrible man sent her a fax! (the horror)
The human faces of the machine are our only hope. The alternative is, in the short term, a machine face of the machine, whom you can't argue with and who will summarily deny your benefits with no chance of appeal. In the long term, the alternative is no machine at all.
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, here's the thing. All the planning and whatnot for the human facing part of the org was done years in advance, and nobody factors/designs in bottom-up change from the consumers of the process. If you aren't willing to comply, you are written off as not the target demographic. Physical production/bureaucracy/software development, it's all the same shit. Just different labels, and by the time the process bumps into you, it's already ossified. Literally the only way to change things is targeting actual executives. They are the only ones with the authority to change things, and they do everything possible to hide themselves/insulate themselves from having to do it. Even then though, it may be for naught. Governmental bureaucrats are often limited by statute/politics/resources. The lack of care we experience on a day to day basis is the system working as designed. Should it be designed that way? Probably not. But until we can figure out a better way to do things, or we stop all being asshats to one another, this is what we have to work with.
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.
> 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.
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.
the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all. the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop. the initial phone call undoubtedly happened, but the fax was consumed by the same systems used in medical offices all around the country, which means that it arrived as a pdf in some repository and it was attached to the client's records in the system. the whole "it has to be a fax" thing is a HIPPA compliance measure about chain of custody, rather than a technological requirement. it "could" be an email, but the data can never at any point be stored in certain ways or in certain locales, or whatever. since most email can't guarantee that, the policies are to only use fax, but then they use a service or application (that provides financial and legal guarantees of custody) to receive incoming faxes as pdfs. sometimes, even as attachments on emails.
Irrelevant. Even if you're right, and not merely oblivious to the space of possible deployments of fax handling support in modern offices, the author (or narrator) is clearly proud of their behavior in situation (or story) they posted, so my comment stands.
>the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all.
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.
possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.
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.
Imagine what would happen if everyone did what the author did. The system would collapse. I think you put a wrong diagnosis that the author couldn't possibly affect the administration. Maybe not much, maybe there was only a chance, but statistically he did put some pressure on that organization.
The process described is literally an attempt at canceling benefits in "frog boiling" method. If Tories went straight to canceling benefits, they would end up in trouble, by making worst possible process they could put it in terms of "verifying eligibility and that benefit funds are not scammed out".
Similar approaches are utilized in other areas of british government, unfortunately.
That politician would cancel their re-election. Assuming it gets that far. Even this federal administration can't handle the pushback of straining benefits. A local government stands zero chance with such a maneuver.
If everyone did it the managers would screech for more money, more headcount, and maybe get it. Worst case the employees are in the same position as before, best case the management is richer and more powerful and possibly some of the current workers become low level management over the new employees. It is doubtful they would try to make the process smoother/easier/accommodating because that would remove the method by which they can gain more power and employees. To see this in action note how agencies are constantly burning up all their budget even if they don't use it so they can justify as much or more the next year, if they have extra time/money they will invent something to justify not giving it up.
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.
They were fucked over already. I can't speak for the but I'd see this as a small bit of retribution.
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.
Per the story, the protagonist DoSed the fax machine. Fax machines are dumb, and employees often don't know how to operate them outside of the most common flow.
>Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in?
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'.
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".
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.
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
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.
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).
> 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.
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 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.
I'm almost certain this is from the UK, and here we have a government that is absolutely obsessed by the concept of benefits fraud. Every real analysis has shown that virtually none exists, but it is a good excuse to tighten up the government budget by trimming some fat (disabled people).
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.
Mere disability re-verification is pretty minor when it comes to bureaucratic insanity. For comparison, in the UK, in recent memory almost a thousand postal service contractors were wrongly convicted of crimes based entirely on a broken government accounting system that constantly got tbe numbers wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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?
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.
In fact, writing to your Congressional rep is probably the way to solve this.
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.
Not that I'm entirely onboard with it, but often you don't have a channel to communicate with "the people who can change the machine", only the cogs in the machine.
It gives you satisfaction. That's the whole value and it can be worth a lot to not hold bitterness long after the problem has passed. I agree with your parent. The cogs are part of the machine, they don't deserve any sympathy just because they chose to do bad things for money any more than a robber deserves sympathy because he's poor.
Depends on your goal. If you want a better machine maybe hating the cogs doesn't help.
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
We could have great public systems, but their is a fundamental problem that perpetually keeps these systems unstable:
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules.
Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.
Is this an outdated requirement? What's the attack surface of an email vs fax? Unless they ban phones at the office, someone could just take a photo of the documents the patient faxed or mailed them
It's a current requirement. (Source: I'm adjacent to a doctor's office.) Two big advantages of faxes are that 1) they're point-to-point, and 2) there's zero caching between the sender and receiver.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s kinda true, but adds a few steps over cmd-P “print to fax”, paste in a phone number, done. And when done, the fax workflow has been tested and approved in courts. It’s a known entity.
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.
Amazingly enough, this is actually not true. Many smaller doctors' offices still have a physical fax machine. I work on automation for certain processes in healthcare and a very large proportion of the faxes we receive come from physical fax machines. You can see artifacts on the fax itself and sometimes the cover letter will have a scribbled note.
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”
Non-consumer printers are also pretty good! I used to teach 120 students, so printing out materials for all of them for a week would sometimes be 1,000+ pages. 500 pages? I can't picture that causing problems for any org that needed to print things regularly.
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.
It's very likely, even in some smaller local governments, that the "Fax" doesn't do any printing at all. Digital faxing has been a staple of bureaucracy for decades.
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.
Well, I'd appreciate Karen is willing to talk and explain whatever inconvenient policies they have. A faceless bureaucracy is even more desperate.
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?
> It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: "Are you still disabled?"
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.
Relevant to this story, laser eye surgery was developed in the late 80s/early 90s and can improve sight to the level that some who were legally blind no longer are.
Hepatitis C has effectively been cured. Obesity, sickle cell, and cystic fibrosis have all heard their death knell though not a complete cure.
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.
Yea, this sounds like a completely reasonable process to me. They should obviously update their system to accept the electronic submission of evidence, but the process itself is fine.
I found this story very surprising in a number of ways, so I gave some of the details a quick search.
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):
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.
You're getting a window into just how much it sucks to be disabled and then have extra burdens put on you. I don't know this author, but I know someone else in a similar position and I absolutely understand where this anger comes from.
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?
I'm blind. This guy is not fighting the system. He's being a jerk to a call center worker and writing fan fiction about her suffering in public. Not a good look.
Having worked in a similar field, providing historic documentation when it’s not necessary usually prolongs the process for the client. This is because the reviewer now has to sort through all these files to make sure new contradictory info isn’t lost in between.
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.
For a second I thought this was one of my friends. He had his eyes removed due to a medical reason (already blind). He recently had to go to a vision doctor and take a vision test. To confirm to his insurance that he was indeed, blind.
The author really lucked out that the government employee was not actually malicious. I can think of a good few ways she could have made life much more difficult for the author, even if he was likely to ultimately succeed.
I worked briefly with an idvidual who had this extreme bureaucratic mentality. I just can't even imagine how you can talk to another person and have no empathy at all for their situation and only care about the process. I also know processes exist for a reason, people will abuse things, and these processes are designed to prevent abuse.
I don't have an answer. I just know that my empathy is too strong. I could never be so rigid and would not thrive in a career requiring that level of disconnect.
I know it's fiction - but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author. The spam should go to the person in charge, not the person who is forced to deal with this every day
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
>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."
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.
> 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?
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.
fascinating. And who is that mythical person in charge
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
The problem in the UK, and many other countries, is that they refuse to split Disabilities in "objectively measurable disabilities" and "not objectively measurable disabilities."
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.
They're overly cautious about creating inadvertent structural forms of discrimination. Although perhaps they're not actually paranoid, given some recent court rulings.
Sure, but its meaningless as you don't need to be fully blind to be legally blind. Its easy to delimitate things if can just change the units to fit your scheme and do away with the ambiguities.
I'm legally blind. This seems needlessly pedantic. What GP was highlighting was a valid distinction between disabilities that are likely or not to change, and how the lack of that distinction leads to the situations like TFA.
The fax machine we had in the office would convert the incoming faxes to email for us. Maybe that's a security violation for them but I find it difficult to believe they don't have some sort of all digital receipt system
The story may be posted today but there's no reason it has to be a recent story. Even the most backward government post in 2026 should have a fax-to-document service that integrates with their document tracker. But there was definitely a 15 to 20 year window from in the 1990s to somewhere in the 2010s where you could send faxes directly from a document one way or another but the recipient was almost certain to be dumping them straight to paper. The story mentions using an internet service which I am not sure would have existed in the 90s (maybe at the very end), but I extend the essence of the story back to the 90s because I remember having a modem that had a printer driver that allowed you to hit "print" and fax someone directly, which you could also easily use to do something like this without any sort of step where you're feeding paper into a physical machine.
While I refuse to work for the govt (my soul would rot), I have family and close friends that do, and the this story (w possibly exaggerated dialogue) is entirely believable.
Aside from the AI writing the blog itself seems to have a false timeline. It says there are posts from April 2017, but the domain has only been up for a year. There is all of this promotion about books, podcasts, volunteering to support the author.
> Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay, obscure writer. He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy endings and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational.
Now I wonder if this is fiction, even if the person is real and they are blind.
I have had to repeatedly attest to my insurance that treatments and meds for my 6 year old son with a genetic condition is not work related. My 6 year old who I will point out is unemployed. Usually it's just a popup screen but occasionally it's a scary letter that threatens to not pay for surgery if not properly filled out.
I found the bureaucrat was a more sympathetic character than the author, and that is saying something. Part of that is because of the bits of the author's story that don't add up. It's apparently "truthy" rather than true. I guess maybe that works sometimes.
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.
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink.
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.
Way back in the previous century my dad once told me that corporate had purchased a thermal fax machine for his department. He hated it and wished it would stop working.
So i asked for its number and sent it lots of completely black pictures. The thermal fax did not like that.
The problem with government services is the rampant fraud. In such cases, fraud is often guilt-free since the government is perceived to have infinite resources. This tempts otherwise honest people to "try their luck" free of conscience, and in most cases, consequence. These silly rules and barriers are meant to increase friction for fraudsters. Unfortunately it comes at the expense of legitimate claimants. I feel your pain and I also feel hers.
Whenever I read stories like this about how hard it is for US people to keep getting the little they've been getting I think of people on the other side. It takes an evil compliance to be the Karen in this article. Zero empathy, zero compassion, you're a row in a spreadsheet. If they'd start caring a little and standing up to what is very obviously wrong, the US would be a much different place. Apply that same logic to "the deep state", military men, etc. It's pretty crazy how much of their situation is their own making, yet they'll happily blame the other side.
To an extent, I agree. At the same time, Karen may be in a similarly desperate situation. While the morally correct position would be to stand up to what is obviously wrong, Karen may need the paycheck to feed her kids. Karen herself is a row in a spreadsheet that the powers that be could replace in a heartbeat.
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.
We have no idea what "Karens" life is actually like. I can think of about 5,000,000 scenarios that make her the more empathetic person in this interaction. People need jobs, government jobs are low paying but secure. This woman isn't making $100,000 a year just to say no to blind people, she very likely could be just scraping by as well, working in a call center, in a soul destroying government office, getting what little she can without a college degree she has neither the money, nor the time to complete. Maybe she worked hard and paid harder and got the degree and then it meant nothing. Very likely her boss and her both know she is eminently replacable. If she stands up she will be the single blade of grass getting chopped by the implacable mower.
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.
Karen is forced to respect the law. The law around benefits is absolutely full of this exact bullshit in the US, because of 50 years of people screeching about "Welfare queens" which was an invented thing.
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.
When the government imposes these rules, this is an outcome they callously ignore.
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.
I don’t like the AI writing style anymore. It’s very readable and it has great words, but it’s lacking imperfections. Like a raytraced 3D render of mathematically perfect shapes.
People forget that AI is trained on mediocre writing too, not everything a person writes is fire. Most of it is a mediocre, too long, and hard to understand; just like the outputs you get from LLMs.
It's ironically kinda less accessible in total, though. Because my browser lets me zoom in on a page almost infinitely, but I can only zoom out enough to make this text go from insanely-big to uncomfortably-large.
Plot twist: Karen's fax machine turns the incoming fax into a PDF, which is saved on the network, and an AI processes it, sending her a summary of 300 words or less.
If the genersted PDFs are stored encrypted in an accessible server with proper access control, then that is a measurable improvement over email containing medical informstion that a random citizen would send, which would be bouncing around unencrypted around at least one third party SMTP server. Of course, if then that person uses an online Fax service, they are sharing that information with at least one other party...
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.)
Yeah there's no way a fax actually gets printed for this. I worked in an admin role like this 25 years ago and incoming faxes went straight to PDF on a network share even back then.
As a government employee, enmeshed in the bureaucracy:
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.
Although I didn't enjoy this fiction of "angry man against system" genre, he did touch an important truth about the fax machine, which this story doesn't properly expand on.
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)
Yes, breppp is completely incorrect. Faxes are used specifically because they can do transmission verification and document evidence of verified successful transmission.
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
In 1998 I worked IT at a government facility and one of my responsibilities was e-fax. Nearly 30 years ago we didn’t print paper copies of everything that was faxed to us or that was sent as a fax…
I cant wait for useless jobs like Karen's from Compliance to be replaced with a highly capable AI that is tuned to think on it's feet (so to speak).
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.
AI or not, the government would benefit from investing more money in improving digital services. Merely slapping an AI onto the existing system will only make things worse. Try using one of the AI hotel receptionists right now to get an idea of what that future looks like.
Could Karen retaliate by saying she never got the required proof? I think she could cause a missed payment or two. Probably it's not Karen, it's the stupid law that requires a piece of paper every x years.
I’m impressed the author was able to learn and handle all the UI while blind. The corner of “just works” computing they live in could be beyond what I’ve ever experienced.
> 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.
> 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."
Agreed. This is fiction. A mere 500 pages isn't going to exhaust the toner of a printer installed specifically to recieve faxes all day, every day.
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.
As another post mentions, this definitely fits into the wider genre of morality/revenge/malicious compliance porn. Regardless of if this is real or fiction, AI generated or not, it's still porn.
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.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I imagine they use a fax server to receive faxes. Which just makes the refusal to accept emails even more objectionable. Likely they only accept faxes solely to make it harder for disabled people.
I love the story (I have close family that has to go through the same crap -it's truly nasty. They deliberately try to intimidate people into giving up their benefits).
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.
I don't know if the US is different, but in my experience dumping your whole medical history like that would just not count as providing "updated medical evidence". They would just tell you to comply and throw the 500 pages in the trash.
Bloody hell. Cerebral palsy, legal blindness then leading to total blindness, and gay. I hope this person lives in a place where at least the last is acceptable because otherwise this is one of the most unlucky rolls you can imagine. They seem to have built a life regardless however. Good for them.
People are judging OP and/or judging Karen. A lot is being lost in translation.
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?
There's a LOT of similar content like this as fast-reading AI generated voice, over on YouTube shorts. The few I listened to were these kinds of GOTCHA HAHA moral superiority games.
And then near the end of like the 3rd one was text that wasn't cut from the TTS engine... "Claude can make mistakes"
AI slop fantasy of a blind jerk getting "revenge" by sending a 512 page fax to a disabilities office, and the government employee calls to BEG for them to stop the "whir-chunk" from the fax machine.
So basically the blogger is wasting resources to spite some givernment drone.bad foe other taxpayers (who need to pay for this fax paper) and bad for environment.
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.
Fictional, but how far away from the truth? I enjoyed this interview with the CIO of the IRS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4odAXoqRT8 who describes his troubles with replacing the fax based system. Security is mentioned. The specific section is around minute 15.
Anyone talking about "fax security" is another monk of security through obscurity.
Phone line can be listened, fax can be hacked[1] and, most of the time, the fax is the copier and everyone in the building has access to it.
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.
I enjoyed the story and yay for him then read after the end, "Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay..."!?!?! What does what the author does in the bedroom have to do with the story I just read? Nothing. I don't give a damn what the author does in their bedroom.
People love to talk about themselves. The internet and social media accelerated the narcissistic character of our society.
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.
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.
“ 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…
This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude
I'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'?
This 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.
> 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.
That is war.
I, as a user with 10k+ karma on HN, can testify that the author has all the hallmarks of a real blind person (active in blind communities and so on). I don't have any evidence suggesting that the author ever engaged in deceptive behavior.
In other words, my P(real) > 0.99.
Sure. He's real. ̶̶̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶:̶ "Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay, obscure writer. He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy ending..."
Edit: Yep, appears I have it wrong. Thanks for the pointers. The non-fiction tag missed my eye.
This 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.
I don't have a word for this, but this falls under the class of things where even if the author who wrote this is did not personally do this and is making it up, it has absolutely 100% happened somewhere, many times over.
For example, it's the same for the DailyWTF... I remember how that would be posted here or on a programming reddit and half the comments would be about how it hadn't happened, and you know, maybe whoever wrote those particular words is just making it up, but I've seen enough just in my little tiny slice of human behavior phase space to know that either the story or something indistinguishably close to it most certainly has happened somewhere, at some time.
let me finish the rest of the sentence for you, which somehow got deleted from your clipboard. weird bug!
"and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
extra weird, because you are the third person that has experienced this bug where you can only paste the first half of that exact sentence.
It is and should be an indictment of the employee personally only in the sense that the employee's tone and manner likely conveyed to OP that she thinks of him as a pothole or a buzzing fly: something you have to deal with, rather than someone who needs to be helped.
Not that she has any power to help him really. I would guess OP is more upset by the dehumanization in her tone, rather than the dehumanization of the system she works within.
I 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.
The person is an agent of the system. That they bear the brunt of the reaction is the system working as intended.
I guess. Faxing it to someone involved in why the rules are that way would be more satisfying to me.
You can fax your congressman.
> 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.
Seems 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.
DOGE was meant to do the opposite
The most unreal part is Karen calling him back. I never get called back by anyone in any office anymore.
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. 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.
> I don't think this woman is happy to have to enforce this idiotic law
But this is exactly what she chooses to do every morning.
> 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
"From a shallow perspective it seems true, but in my experience bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy"
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?
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.
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?
"Was this woman just following the law?"
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.
> in my experience bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy.
What possible kind of 'experience' could you have to judge such a thing, save for personal preconceptions and biases?
The only experience I can have is personal. In my experience of dealing with and working with them, only those that I've had experience with.
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.
> The only experience I can have is personal.
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.
"Assuming that it's a preconception and not observed is a bizarre assumption."
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.
Nobody enjoys working in a call centre
I 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
This 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.
> 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."
I hate it when bureaucrats ask me to send e-mails because they are not encrypted. Specially my ID. It's a security risk, indeed
She could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.
>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.
It may read that way to you. It does not to me.
Karen woke up this morning in her run down, rented flat. She briefly looks at the collections letter that showed up yesterday due to an unaffordable repair she had to pay for on her credit card. Another letter from her ex-partner's lawyer. As she rushes out the door (she spilled coffee on her one nice sweater, her favorite) her mom flashes through her mind... "What about mum?". She arrives at the office. It is an oppressive, sterile government office. She tries to ignore the overwhelming sense of helplessness and sits down to begin working. Her first call is a person screaming at her about their benefits. She has no power, absolutely no power, to help them due to the rules imposed on her by her superiors, but has to take the abuse regardless and explain the process she has no control over to them. The next call is a case she actually is familiar with: a person claiming to be disabled to collect dole. They aren't, but she has been told that this is a special case and she must work with them. She complies. She sits back in her chair and the phone rings again. An upset person on the other end...
"I have the documents in PDF format"
I agree wholeheartedly! This is exactly what i was thinking the entire time. Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in? Will the 0.5% uptick in toner cost for the year cause the administration to rethink their requirements? He's just taken the immense weight and pain he holds for this process, undeservedly, and placed it upon another undeserving person, then laughed at her anguish.
Yes, life is hard, but surely we can bear our troubles in a way that don't make others harder to bear. Or at least aim your troubles at someone who has any power at all to change things! Find a better way to fight the system, that isn't just stabbing other people trapped in the box with you
I see this type of an argumentation very often and I strongly disagree.
You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.
I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.
I find it far more effective to make friends with and be kind to that employee, and then describe how I know it isn't their fault but this one aspect of the thing that their company does really sucks, right? They're then able to carry that specific complaint from one of their best customers up the chain.
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.
> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
These huge businesses and huge governments are too big for one person at the bottom of the totem pole to make a difference. Sure, they may share 1/N of the culpability for what their organization is doing, but if they rage quit, they will be immediately replaced with another body. The organization won't even notice it.
Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
Until one day... Afroman releases a new album.
> One wallet changes nothing.
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.
That's a fun fantasy, but I think in my case it would lead to disappointment. I regularly imagine that I sowed the seed to cause X thing to take off in Y community, but it's going to turn out that it was just the zeitgeist operating every time, and the true role of my mind in influencing others is only that of a conduit, or sewer.
So what is the argument here? That it is irrelevant because there is no critical mass?
Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?
The French Revolution didn't just happen spontaneously from individuals acting individually. You need leadership and coordinated action to change things. A small number of individuals acting individually, yet pushing in the same direction, will never move a needle.
Eh, it has an impact. It's not always obvious but it adds up over time. Use your analogy of choice: slowly building up pressure until it boils over or a small pebble starting an avalanche or whatever works for you.
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.
Nope. It’s like thinking you can overthrow the government by littering. It’s just being lame. If you’re going to be lame to other people, don’t gloat about your lameness online. “If everybody littered, they’d have to do something about it!”
It's not littering. It shows why fax is stupid and they should accept email. Littering has no such benefit.
It's needlessly generating excessive amounts of trash and waste. It's wasting tax money. It's hurting the next blind person who won't be able to fax his documents because the machine is down/overloaded. It does not show why fax is stupid. It shows that faxing reams of unnecessary paperwork is stupid. It does not show that they should accept PDFs over email (genuinely a great way to get hacked). There is no benefit in trying to DoS the SSA office.
You kind of missed my point but that's OK. You can agree with or disagree with the action OP took, I'm not making a judgement call on that.
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.
What's missing is coordination. Coordinated individuals taking actions together can change things. But just relying on individuals stochastically, randomly acting doesn't work. You can't random-walk your way to political change, even if a lot of people are random-walking in one direction.
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...
Then I'm guessing you don't vote, right? Because one vote makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.
One vote does, unlikely to be yours though.
How's Target doing? Zero impact?
They're still doing business. Every single day. With hundreds of billions in revenue and an increasing number of stores popping up all over the place. Impact can be non-zero and still be not enough to meaningfully change anything.
> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.
That's pretty vague. I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but OK.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
Absolutely agree. Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans. They need to get bitten sometimes.
> Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans.
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 make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
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.
No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
And also, they are not supposed to use their intuitive ideas about what is and what is not dangerous use of software. When they do use their intuitive ideas, hacks happen. Karen here doing what she was told and accepting only formats that her organization security team told her to do is Karen doing the correct thing.
We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us. And we are all paid way more then Karen, but are the first to call Karen an idiot when the hack happens. Karen does not know why pdf is different from doc or whatever. Nor is she required to know.
>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
Yes, but a boss being unable to receive a fax because the machine is "otherwise occupied" may do that.
I highly doubt it. Not accepting PDF files from random email addresses that send to your very publicly listed email address is a smart policy. One angry jerk trying to DoS the fax machine is not going to change the policy. At best, it'd cause them to ditch the paper and toner and upgrade so that all incoming faxes are automatically scanned and sent to an email box.
> We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us.
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.
> No IT professional is going to say to use a fax machine for security.
An IT professional will say don't open PDF files from every random email that comes into your publicly posted email address though.
Disagree. Employees need to be responsible and make their voices heard. The whole thing was justified. We enable nightmares with our acquiescence.
And how does the author (or you) know she doesn't keep raising this?
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
You mean, Karen lied?
No, that is not what I meant. If anything, the blogpost author might have, but that's not what I mean either.
It is entirely possible for both parties to have simply missed thinking of this. Or for me to be missing or misunderstanding something.
>No amount of beating low level employees will change whether they can accept pdf sent by email or not.
I disagree. I'm sorry Karen here needs to bear the brunt, but if this kept up, at some point Karen's boss will take notice, And then it moves up the chain to someone who can affect that policy.
Companies purposefully set us up to communicate bottom-up, so we can either play the game or break the law.
>People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us
No, it'd be a policy maker or CEO who thinks we're in the 90's and that secure email documentation isn't a thing. "We" could suggest so many ways to handle it that would save costs while being more secure. We're not much higher on the totem pole than Karen.
Yet suddenly, we get these incidents and our bosses are suddenly rushing to IT to find a solution. As if 6 months of deliberation wasn't enough.
> 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.
That’s a hilarious fantasy you have here.
I sorta feel there's as much fantasy on the other side. The situation as is—the concrete one we're discussing here—exists. You're voting for a version where this person doesn't complain through the methods designed for it and instead writes to the CEO or something and has things fixed that way. Or possibly just doesn't complain about being screwed at all.
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.
If the author didn't abuse the fax, why would anyone notice the process was broken. It's only by abusing the existing process that change will be triggered.
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.
I'm open to options. Not doomerism "the system can't be fixed" mentality. I don't like to think of myself as combative. Ideally we get listened to in council and they properly pull what strings are needed to help.
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.
> 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.
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.
>your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.
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.
This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
> This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.
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.
That seems like a problem for the telcos to resolve. I.e. don't allow calls from nations that do this.
The Bible of course also says "if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee", which is where I thought you were going with this at first. The Bible says a lot of things.
It's tricky, because _sometimes_ they do. And the system doesn't give you guidance on whether you're talking to someone who (officially or not) can change the process. So, based mostly on our personality, we all push a different amount before giving up.
Relatable example: I needed to schedule a Pediatric appointment, her assigned Dr was on vacation, and the first receptionist stonewalled on switching Drs within the practice. The second one did it in 2m on her side and guided me to updating insurance in 2m on my side.
Another similar example: Since it's tax time, I had to call a us gov office with a question. The first rep claimed "their system was down" and couldn't help me. I hung up and called back. The second rep was just nasty and stonewalled me by inundating me with security questions and refusing to "verify" my identity, so I eventually hung up and called back a third time. The third rep answered my question within a few minutes, and was a thorough pleasure to deal with.
I mean, I get that these guys might not be getting paid, with the government shutdown tomfoolery, but come on!
As an alternate framing, with the paperwork be giving her what she needs to go to her boss and escalate, and their boss as needed - the paperwork as a magic ticket for everyone to advocate. To qualify that, the fax is a limited resource, and I'd be concerned about how what other things the fax might be needed for to help other people in a timely manner...
Perhaps the fax-related expenses would be the magic ticket their boss needed to justify security scanning of emails with PDFs. I just listened to Trump brag for ten minutes about replacing the thousand-dollar signing pens.
The post is tagged non-fiction, but it ignores the option to "Complete your Disabilty Update Report Online (https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-cdrs-ussi.htm), which I found after following the link in the first sentence.
The form is an embedded iFrame from "Adobe Acrobat Sign", supposedly pure Javascript . It would be a bigger story if this form were not accessible to the disabled.
The form includes a place to attach two PDF, text, or image formats. "Attachments are limited to 5MB and 25 pages".
A couple of possibilities spring to mind. Likelier that Karen lied, but maybe the 512 page fax changed the system.
The post dated March 25 2026 says "This week, I received The Letter."
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.
Other responders have replied well, so I will offer a slight augmentation: Yes, this is bad outcome for the bureaucrat, through no mistake of her own. A wrong has been committed against her - but not by the author - by her employer, and the system which employs her and sets these regulations. They cannot (Although they will if asked) claim ignorance or innocence: It is their fault alone for this experience.
In this case the problem can't easily be blamed on "the system". Government benefits are this way because politicians have for years blamed "benefit cheats" and "welfare queens" and other boogymen, people have voted based on this, and now the law is you have to prove you're still congenitally blind every year. The system is working, it's actually doing what the politicians and their voters want.
Explain that to the Karen, then... and let her suffer, instead of the poor blind taxpayer.
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.
They attacked a fax machine, I don't think it has feelings. The woman will get over her frustration at seeing it print for two hours.
I also been on the customer service side and it's really annoying getting angry persona after angry person trying to push their frustrations on you for something you have no control.
Oh, me too. I started out as tech support for a dial up ISP in the 90s. It was rough. I am always polite to customer service. I just feel like it wasn't the lady that was attacked so much as it was the fax machine, the policy, the institution. She had some frustration, but it sounds like he was even polite to her, Didn't yell, didn't call her names or anything. He just opted for malicious compliance.
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.
This isn't a happy counterargument or anything, but (bad as it is) this is this person's job. Or rather it is the job. Their employer has customer service in order for it to buffer—in a cost efficient way—the one or many layers of people above this person from their (profitable) bad policies. It's a punching bag. And it's that because bad policy + punching bag is more profitable than good policy. It might even be the business/market. If the frustrating call leads to 50% of callers giving up (or not calling at all) and just paying something they might not owe, that's a nice net ROI. You might build a business around that, one that wouldn’t have the margins otherwise. You get the callers caving because they feel bad yelling at the unfortunate employees, meanwhile it's in the company's formal protocol to only correct it (or escalate the ticket to someone who could) after the customer has yelled long enough.
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.
Right, shouldn't make her workday stressful, she's just following orders.
I file this under " don't be a dick, especially to the disabled". You wonder why most bankers avoid a lot of this, despite handling one of the most stressful aspect of modern humanity? It's becsuse they tend to be thr friendliest talkers out there. They know the reputation and trust of the banking system is what keeps their money in. They can be just as slimy as a used car salesman in tactics, but we're still interfacing with a human, and humans generally like to feel like they matter.
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.
>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.
exactly this. I didn't put you in a bad job; you - and to a large extent, your society - did. 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. but if you pick up a phone to talk to a client or customer, you are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such. fix you mind to understand that people are trying to find the right things to say to you to get what they need at that moment. no different from someone putting in quarters to get a soda from a vending machine. I do X, I get Y. if there is a breakdown in getting Y, I will try other things beyond X. so, in this example, I tried to be reasonable; I tried to make this simple for me while simultaneously making it simple for both you and the machine you are representing. if it is the machine that prevents you from accepting that simplicity, then explain as much as they let you, apologize like a human being for the failings of the machine you represent, and ignore literally all of the rest of it. you can only do what you can do. they can only get what they can get. 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. if you're a real superstar, take note of the specific situation and place it somewhere you can provide a collection of specific situations for review.
> if you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine
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.
How dare!
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.
Spoken from the pretty obvious position of never having to have worked a low-wage people facing job.
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".
Being paid a low wage doesn't give you a right to mistreat people because of you conditions. There are no justified resentments
The employee didn't mistreat anyone. She simply stated the procedure (which sucks!).
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.
Sorry I disagree. Being inhuman in your job by being overly bureaucratic is a thing.
I'd say that is likewise for treating your customer as a nuisance instead of taking the time to explain the circumstance.
lol. stopped reading after your first line because I've worked every low-wage, customer facing job you can imagine. shoe salesman, phone rep for verizon and then t mobile and then at&t, fast food, local diner waitstaff, office receptionist, contract installer, HVAC repair, cable service tech. that's a truncated list. I have the opinions I have because I've had those jobs, not in spite of them. I know how I carried myself, and it was a very low bar to reach. it's only when people don't reach that bar that I raise issue. because the bar is "know where you are, know what you can do, know what you can't do, and be as accommodating and responsive to the client/customer as you possibly can be, given your constraints." doesn't feel onerous to me. and in this specific case, I don't even have a problem with karen, per se. at least not from the content of the story. my reply was in response to other people insisting that karen needs to be coddled because all she did was answer a phone and this horrible man sent her a fax! (the horror)
The human faces of the machine are our only hope. The alternative is, in the short term, a machine face of the machine, whom you can't argue with and who will summarily deny your benefits with no chance of appeal. In the long term, the alternative is no machine at all.
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/.
See, here's the thing. All the planning and whatnot for the human facing part of the org was done years in advance, and nobody factors/designs in bottom-up change from the consumers of the process. If you aren't willing to comply, you are written off as not the target demographic. Physical production/bureaucracy/software development, it's all the same shit. Just different labels, and by the time the process bumps into you, it's already ossified. Literally the only way to change things is targeting actual executives. They are the only ones with the authority to change things, and they do everything possible to hide themselves/insulate themselves from having to do it. Even then though, it may be for naught. Governmental bureaucrats are often limited by statute/politics/resources. The lack of care we experience on a day to day basis is the system working as designed. Should it be designed that way? Probably not. But until we can figure out a better way to do things, or we stop all being asshats to one another, this is what we have to work with.
> if i was in her position, i would shrug and hand my boss the 500 pieces of paper.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all. the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop. the initial phone call undoubtedly happened, but the fax was consumed by the same systems used in medical offices all around the country, which means that it arrived as a pdf in some repository and it was attached to the client's records in the system. the whole "it has to be a fax" thing is a HIPPA compliance measure about chain of custody, rather than a technological requirement. it "could" be an email, but the data can never at any point be stored in certain ways or in certain locales, or whatever. since most email can't guarantee that, the policies are to only use fax, but then they use a service or application (that provides financial and legal guarantees of custody) to receive incoming faxes as pdfs. sometimes, even as attachments on emails.
Irrelevant. Even if you're right, and not merely oblivious to the space of possible deployments of fax handling support in modern offices, the author (or narrator) is clearly proud of their behavior in situation (or story) they posted, so my comment stands.
The text leans heavily ChatGPT.
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.
>the author didn't make anything harder for anyone because the "fax" wasn't ever even printed, much less caused a backup or even a slowdown at all.
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.
possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.
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.
Imagine what would happen if everyone did what the author did. The system would collapse. I think you put a wrong diagnosis that the author couldn't possibly affect the administration. Maybe not much, maybe there was only a chance, but statistically he did put some pressure on that organization.
More likely they'd just cancel the benefits.
The process described is literally an attempt at canceling benefits in "frog boiling" method. If Tories went straight to canceling benefits, they would end up in trouble, by making worst possible process they could put it in terms of "verifying eligibility and that benefit funds are not scammed out".
Similar approaches are utilized in other areas of british government, unfortunately.
That politician would cancel their re-election. Assuming it gets that far. Even this federal administration can't handle the pushback of straining benefits. A local government stands zero chance with such a maneuver.
If everyone did it the managers would screech for more money, more headcount, and maybe get it. Worst case the employees are in the same position as before, best case the management is richer and more powerful and possibly some of the current workers become low level management over the new employees. It is doubtful they would try to make the process smoother/easier/accommodating because that would remove the method by which they can gain more power and employees. To see this in action note how agencies are constantly burning up all their budget even if they don't use it so they can justify as much or more the next year, if they have extra time/money they will invent something to justify not giving it up.
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.
Yes, the republican dominated congress will allocate more money for these, because some social service manager is screeching over pdfs. Really?
They were fucked over already. I can't speak for the but I'd see this as a small bit of retribution.
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.
Per the story, the protagonist DoSed the fax machine. Fax machines are dumb, and employees often don't know how to operate them outside of the most common flow.
>Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in?
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'.
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
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
They're motivated financially to do so. There's bonuses.
That is what raincole is asking about. Do you have a source for this, in the Uk context?
The USA federal system is similar from people I've spoken to. They basically tell you most applications of benefits will only be approved on appeal.
I'm almost certain this is from the UK, and here we have a government that is absolutely obsessed by the concept of benefits fraud. Every real analysis has shown that virtually none exists, but it is a good excuse to tighten up the government budget by trimming some fat (disabled people).
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.
Mere disability re-verification is pretty minor when it comes to bureaucratic insanity. For comparison, in the UK, in recent memory almost a thousand postal service contractors were wrongly convicted of crimes based entirely on a broken government accounting system that constantly got tbe numbers wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).
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.
>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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
The people saying "how dare you hurt that ablative layer" are no less evil than those implementing it IMO.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
"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.
> 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?
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.
In fact, writing to your Congressional rep is probably the way to solve this.
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.
> _do_ cause the system to change
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.
> And saying it doesn't is like saying "my one piece of litter won't make the park dirty".
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.
and likewise, "hate the cogs" takes are equally worthless. All nuance is lost, the cycle repeats again.
Yeah and wayyy more importantly cops don't get fired for not escalating and killing a guy!
What good does hating the cogs do though? Make noise to the people who can change the machine.
Not that I'm entirely onboard with it, but often you don't have a channel to communicate with "the people who can change the machine", only the cogs in the machine.
When you hate the machine as a whole, the cogs are also in scope.
It increases costs for the machine, and eventually it realizes that cogs are cheaper when they're not getting yelled at all day.
It gives you satisfaction. That's the whole value and it can be worth a lot to not hold bitterness long after the problem has passed. I agree with your parent. The cogs are part of the machine, they don't deserve any sympathy just because they chose to do bad things for money any more than a robber deserves sympathy because he's poor.
Depends on your goal. If you want a better machine maybe hating the cogs doesn't help.
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.
> "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."
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.
This experiment feels related
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.
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
Seems potentially libelous to claim this person isn't actually blind.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
We could have great public systems, but their is a fundamental problem that perpetually keeps these systems unstable:
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?
> 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.
If you think there’s no free will then you won’t argue with me when I say I think there is.
But they will argue with you, for it was predestined.
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.
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?
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.
right
Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules.
Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.
Is this an outdated requirement? What's the attack surface of an email vs fax? Unless they ban phones at the office, someone could just take a photo of the documents the patient faxed or mailed them
> What's the attack surface of an email vs fax?
I believe the primary concern has been while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.
Additionally the storage of email was cited as a concern, making mass data breaches much simpler.
Note that there is a HIPAA approved email service called Direct, as in Direct Messaging / Direct Exchange / Direct Connect.
It's a current requirement. (Source: I'm adjacent to a doctor's office.) Two big advantages of faxes are that 1) they're point-to-point, and 2) there's zero caching between the sender and receiver.
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.
> 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.
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.
That’s kinda true, but adds a few steps over cmd-P “print to fax”, paste in a phone number, done. And when done, the fax workflow has been tested and approved in courts. It’s a known entity.
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.
We still deal with doctors who handwrite their progress notes. Fax will be around for a very, very long time.
That's a very 1993 understanding of telecommunications.
Most faxes today are between two fax over the Internet services and so are completely pointless.
Amazingly enough, this is actually not true. Many smaller doctors' offices still have a physical fax machine. I work on automation for certain processes in healthcare and a very large proportion of the faxes we receive come from physical fax machines. You can see artifacts on the fax itself and sometimes the cover letter will have a scribbled note.
It's also funny because at work our fax machines don't print unless we go over and print it. The machine just converts the fax to PDF.
This is an indictment of email more than anything.
The ending is a little hard to believe.
My sister has a job somewhat like this for a school system. Multiply the number of working hours by the number of workers, divide by the number of active cases and the number of hours each case takes to resolve. The answer is that a large number of cases will not be done by their deadlines.
If someone wanted to send her a 500 page fax, she’s just going to shrug and work on something else. If she gives it even a passing thought, it would be “this ass better hope his fax finishes printing before the deadline for benefit cutoff”
Unplug fax, no one gets benefits that day, simple fix and the office's day just got a little easier. What was already printed goes in the shred bin.
Non-consumer printers are also pretty good! I used to teach 120 students, so printing out materials for all of them for a week would sometimes be 1,000+ pages. 500 pages? I can't picture that causing problems for any org that needed to print things regularly.
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/...
It's very likely, even in some smaller local governments, that the "Fax" doesn't do any printing at all. Digital faxing has been a staple of bureaucracy for decades.
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.
Well, I'd appreciate Karen is willing to talk and explain whatever inconvenient policies they have. A faceless bureaucracy is even more desperate.
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?
> It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: "Are you still disabled?"
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.
> There are curable disabilities.
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.
Relevant to this story, laser eye surgery was developed in the late 80s/early 90s and can improve sight to the level that some who were legally blind no longer are.
> Relevant to this story
Is it? The Author mentions he has degenerated optical nerves from birth, I don't think laser fixes that.
Hepatitis C has effectively been cured. Obesity, sickle cell, and cystic fibrosis have all heard their death knell though not a complete cure.
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.
Yea, this sounds like a completely reasonable process to me. They should obviously update their system to accept the electronic submission of evidence, but the process itself is fine.
And there's also fraud. If there's no periodic check, a single diagnosis from a corrupt doctor can give someone disability benefits for life.
This might not be the right frequency, though, and only accepting post/fax is bullshit. Doubly so for short deadlines.
I found this story very surprising in a number of ways, so I gave some of the details a quick search.
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?
The entire blog is probably generated by OpenClawd or the like. I don’t think it’s a real story.
I cannot get over the malice seeping through this author's writing. Happiness does not come from making others miserable.
You're getting a window into just how much it sucks to be disabled and then have extra burdens put on you. I don't know this author, but I know someone else in a similar position and I absolutely understand where this anger comes from.
Regardless of the condition of your life, harboring anger and malice never leads to fulfilment.
Sure, and if depressed people weren't sad, they'd be happier. 'Just don't get frustrated' isn't actionable advice.
That's not what I said. To feel an emotion is morally neutral, while to use your emotions to cause harm is wrong.
The anger is not unjustified. Directing it at people who are nearly as helpless as you in the situation is not justified or remotely helpful.
(I'm blind myself.)
Seriously.
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?
I'm blind. This guy is not fighting the system. He's being a jerk to a call center worker and writing fan fiction about her suffering in public. Not a good look.
Having worked in a similar field, providing historic documentation when it’s not necessary usually prolongs the process for the client. This is because the reviewer now has to sort through all these files to make sure new contradictory info isn’t lost in between.
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.
For a second I thought this was one of my friends. He had his eyes removed due to a medical reason (already blind). He recently had to go to a vision doctor and take a vision test. To confirm to his insurance that he was indeed, blind.
I have no eyes and I must take a vision test to prove I'm blind.
"Cover your left eye .... look straight at that chart and tell me what the third line from the bottom says ..."
Regulatory capture.
This exact dynamic exists in the UK too.
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.
The author really lucked out that the government employee was not actually malicious. I can think of a good few ways she could have made life much more difficult for the author, even if he was likely to ultimately succeed.
I worked briefly with an idvidual who had this extreme bureaucratic mentality. I just can't even imagine how you can talk to another person and have no empathy at all for their situation and only care about the process. I also know processes exist for a reason, people will abuse things, and these processes are designed to prevent abuse.
I don't have an answer. I just know that my empathy is too strong. I could never be so rigid and would not thrive in a career requiring that level of disconnect.
I know it's fiction - but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author. The spam should go to the person in charge, not the person who is forced to deal with this every day
> I know it's fiction
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
>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."
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.
> 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?
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.
You can usually tell these people apart though, they sound empathetic. The one in the story doesn't.
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.
fascinating. And who is that mythical person in charge
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
The problem in the UK, and many other countries, is that they refuse to split Disabilities in "objectively measurable disabilities" and "not objectively measurable disabilities."
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.
They're overly cautious about creating inadvertent structural forms of discrimination. Although perhaps they're not actually paranoid, given some recent court rulings.
>you can just objectively measure if someone is fully blind
No not really. Blindness is a spectrum.
https://www.cnib.ca/en/sight-loss-info/blindness/what-blindn...
https://www.perkins.org/what-blindness-really-looks-like/
That's presumably what the word 'fully' is being employed for.
Sure, but its meaningless as you don't need to be fully blind to be legally blind. Its easy to delimitate things if can just change the units to fit your scheme and do away with the ambiguities.
I'm legally blind. This seems needlessly pedantic. What GP was highlighting was a valid distinction between disabilities that are likely or not to change, and how the lack of that distinction leads to the situations like TFA.
The fax machine we had in the office would convert the incoming faxes to email for us. Maybe that's a security violation for them but I find it difficult to believe they don't have some sort of all digital receipt system
The story may be posted today but there's no reason it has to be a recent story. Even the most backward government post in 2026 should have a fax-to-document service that integrates with their document tracker. But there was definitely a 15 to 20 year window from in the 1990s to somewhere in the 2010s where you could send faxes directly from a document one way or another but the recipient was almost certain to be dumping them straight to paper. The story mentions using an internet service which I am not sure would have existed in the 90s (maybe at the very end), but I extend the essence of the story back to the 90s because I remember having a modem that had a printer driver that allowed you to hit "print" and fax someone directly, which you could also easily use to do something like this without any sort of step where you're feeding paper into a physical machine.
Faxes have been "obsolete" a really long time.
While I refuse to work for the govt (my soul would rot), I have family and close friends that do, and the this story (w possibly exaggerated dialogue) is entirely believable.
Yeah, there are also business that provide this as a service.
Funny to think of the author sending documents to a computer-to-fax service and the recipient doing the reverse.
Aside from the AI writing the blog itself seems to have a false timeline. It says there are posts from April 2017, but the domain has only been up for a year. There is all of this promotion about books, podcasts, volunteering to support the author.
What is this about?
> It says there are posts from April 2017, but the domain has only been up for a year.
I don't know the author, but presumably the blog predates the domain.
People migrate their blogs.
I guess "I harassed a random low level employee because I took a request to fax documents as a personal insult" wasn't as catchy of a title?
> Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay, obscure writer. He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy endings and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational.
Now I wonder if this is fiction, even if the person is real and they are blind.
for some reason, you forgot to copy/paste the rest of the sentence, which continues with:
"and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
> for some reason, you forgot to copy/paste the rest of the sentence, which continues with:
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.
Great read. While I admire the spite, I question the wisdom of pissing off a government employee with the power to deny your benefits.
I have had to repeatedly attest to my insurance that treatments and meds for my 6 year old son with a genetic condition is not work related. My 6 year old who I will point out is unemployed. Usually it's just a popup screen but occasionally it's a scary letter that threatens to not pay for surgery if not properly filled out.
I found the bureaucrat was a more sympathetic character than the author, and that is saying something. Part of that is because of the bits of the author's story that don't add up. It's apparently "truthy" rather than true. I guess maybe that works sometimes.
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.
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink.
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.
How many fax lines still go to a physical machine that prints on paper?
It’s a lot less paper to have a pdf of the fax emailed.
You'd be surprised how many doctors still rely on a physical fax machine.
Way back in the previous century my dad once told me that corporate had purchased a thermal fax machine for his department. He hated it and wished it would stop working.
So i asked for its number and sent it lots of completely black pictures. The thermal fax did not like that.
Disabled, fake and gay. Oh my.
The problem with government services is the rampant fraud. In such cases, fraud is often guilt-free since the government is perceived to have infinite resources. This tempts otherwise honest people to "try their luck" free of conscience, and in most cases, consequence. These silly rules and barriers are meant to increase friction for fraudsters. Unfortunately it comes at the expense of legitimate claimants. I feel your pain and I also feel hers.
Whenever I read stories like this about how hard it is for US people to keep getting the little they've been getting I think of people on the other side. It takes an evil compliance to be the Karen in this article. Zero empathy, zero compassion, you're a row in a spreadsheet. If they'd start caring a little and standing up to what is very obviously wrong, the US would be a much different place. Apply that same logic to "the deep state", military men, etc. It's pretty crazy how much of their situation is their own making, yet they'll happily blame the other side.
To an extent, I agree. At the same time, Karen may be in a similarly desperate situation. While the morally correct position would be to stand up to what is obviously wrong, Karen may need the paycheck to feed her kids. Karen herself is a row in a spreadsheet that the powers that be could replace in a heartbeat.
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.
This is not a US thing, this is a bureaucracy thing. You can enjoy that worldwide (at least in every "civilized" country).
I can confirm this from France.
We have no idea what "Karens" life is actually like. I can think of about 5,000,000 scenarios that make her the more empathetic person in this interaction. People need jobs, government jobs are low paying but secure. This woman isn't making $100,000 a year just to say no to blind people, she very likely could be just scraping by as well, working in a call center, in a soul destroying government office, getting what little she can without a college degree she has neither the money, nor the time to complete. Maybe she worked hard and paid harder and got the degree and then it meant nothing. Very likely her boss and her both know she is eminently replacable. If she stands up she will be the single blade of grass getting chopped by the implacable mower.
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.
Karen is forced to respect the law. The law around benefits is absolutely full of this exact bullshit in the US, because of 50 years of people screeching about "Welfare queens" which was an invented thing.
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.
I don't believe this is actually real, but it was great to read nonetheless.
it's fictional, it says that in the bottom (nvm, tagged nonfictional)
the bottom actually says:
"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.
It actually doesn't say that.
It's also tagged "nonfiction" though
Yes, clearly. Something like this could never happen in the real healthcare system, that would be absurd.
When the government imposes these rules, this is an outcome they callously ignore.
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.
I don’t like the AI writing style anymore. It’s very readable and it has great words, but it’s lacking imperfections. Like a raytraced 3D render of mathematically perfect shapes.
I don't think this author uses LLMs. I follow them online and they hate generative AI.
I guess I don’t like their style then. My bad. Sorry about that.
[How confident are you that this writer uses AI?](https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-colonization-of-con...)
People forget that AI is trained on mediocre writing too, not everything a person writes is fire. Most of it is a mediocre, too long, and hard to understand; just like the outputs you get from LLMs.
https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...
Giving them a pass since he or she is blind. The text is also very large intentionally
I'm grateful for that. I never liked the hn default size even when my eyes were younger.
It's ironically kinda less accessible in total, though. Because my browser lets me zoom in on a page almost infinitely, but I can only zoom out enough to make this text go from insanely-big to uncomfortably-large.
It’s a neural network. You can see the macro pretending to be real aspects because our brain is neural too. Interesting, but not thinking.
Plot twist: Karen's fax machine turns the incoming fax into a PDF, which is saved on the network, and an AI processes it, sending her a summary of 300 words or less.
No government workers were harmed.
Minus the AI part, I agree. I'm 100% convinced many fax machines nowadays exist just for bureaucracy and are actually fax-to-pdf.
If the genersted PDFs are stored encrypted in an accessible server with proper access control, then that is a measurable improvement over email containing medical informstion that a random citizen would send, which would be bouncing around unencrypted around at least one third party SMTP server. Of course, if then that person uses an online Fax service, they are sharing that information with at least one other party...
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.)
Yeah there's no way a fax actually gets printed for this. I worked in an admin role like this 25 years ago and incoming faxes went straight to PDF on a network share even back then.
As a government employee, enmeshed in the bureaucracy:
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.
And then everybody, including the fax machine, stood up and clapped.
Although I didn't enjoy this fiction of "angry man against system" genre, he did touch an important truth about the fax machine, which this story doesn't properly expand on.
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)
Surely some of the online fax services are offering retention and certification of what's sent? Seems like free money to add a checkbox at checkout.
Yes, breppp is completely incorrect. Faxes are used specifically because they can do transmission verification and document evidence of verified successful transmission.
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
In 1998 I worked IT at a government facility and one of my responsibilities was e-fax. Nearly 30 years ago we didn’t print paper copies of everything that was faxed to us or that was sent as a fax…
I cant wait for useless jobs like Karen's from Compliance to be replaced with a highly capable AI that is tuned to think on it's feet (so to speak).
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.
AI or not, the government would benefit from investing more money in improving digital services. Merely slapping an AI onto the existing system will only make things worse. Try using one of the AI hotel receptionists right now to get an idea of what that future looks like.
Could Karen retaliate by saying she never got the required proof? I think she could cause a missed payment or two. Probably it's not Karen, it's the stupid law that requires a piece of paper every x years.
I’m impressed the author was able to learn and handle all the UI while blind. The corner of “just works” computing they live in could be beyond what I’ve ever experienced.
it's fiction (seemingly everything is on the site?). maybe the title should reflect that
It's tagged "nonfiction" just below the title.
It's tagged nonfiction.
Apparently we have a case of discerning truth by whether we’re downvoting someone saying it’s fiction.
This reads like fiction.
> 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.
I enjoyed this read, but:
> 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.
Agreed. This is fiction. A mere 500 pages isn't going to exhaust the toner of a printer installed specifically to recieve faxes all day, every day.
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.
Take a job helping the disabled claim benefits they said. It'll be nice and you can help disabled people they said.
I love malicious compliance, but it's more fun when you suffer along with them.
entirely AI generated
https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...
As another post mentions, this definitely fits into the wider genre of morality/revenge/malicious compliance porn. Regardless of if this is real or fiction, AI generated or not, it's still porn.
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.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I imagine they use a fax server to receive faxes. Which just makes the refusal to accept emails even more objectionable. Likely they only accept faxes solely to make it harder for disabled people.
This is proof that you don't need vision to create a thing of beauty.
Inspiring, Nietzchean even.
I love the story (I have close family that has to go through the same crap -it's truly nasty. They deliberately try to intimidate people into giving up their benefits).
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.
I don't know if the US is different, but in my experience dumping your whole medical history like that would just not count as providing "updated medical evidence". They would just tell you to comply and throw the 500 pages in the trash.
Bloody hell. Cerebral palsy, legal blindness then leading to total blindness, and gay. I hope this person lives in a place where at least the last is acceptable because otherwise this is one of the most unlucky rolls you can imagine. They seem to have built a life regardless however. Good for them.
This entire post is clearly AI generated. My internal AI detector didn't kick in until the sixth paragraph. More slop for the feed.
Yeah GPTZero says 100% AI generated
I read this:
>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
People are judging OP and/or judging Karen. A lot is being lost in translation.
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.
Considering the sentiments usually expressed on HN, it's kind of shocking the ratio of people judging the people vs those judging the system.
I hope this didn't really happen, but I loved reading it.
Oh boy.
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.
Yea, the front service desk worker doesn't deserve that shit. Dick move.
Should be a law that every person spends 2 years at first line customer service before they are eligible for working anywhere else.
There's a LOT of similar content like this as fast-reading AI generated voice, over on YouTube shorts. The few I listened to were these kinds of GOTCHA HAHA moral superiority games.
And then near the end of like the 3rd one was text that wasn't cut from the TTS engine... "Claude can make mistakes"
This site is so nice.
Whew, is it? The text size is gigantic, on mobile I’m seeing about 3 words per line, really not a fan of this typography.
AI slop fantasy of a blind jerk getting "revenge" by sending a 512 page fax to a disabilities office, and the government employee calls to BEG for them to stop the "whir-chunk" from the fax machine.
So basically the blogger is wasting resources to spite some givernment drone.bad foe other taxpayers (who need to pay for this fax paper) and bad for environment.
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.
A protagonist in a pathetic revenge fantasy so insufferably smug that they actually reward themselves with a cookie at the end. Gag me.
what's wrong with you?
Chefs Kiss, thank you for that bit of schadenfreude to go with my morning coffee.
Fictional, but how far away from the truth? I enjoyed this interview with the CIO of the IRS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4odAXoqRT8 who describes his troubles with replacing the fax based system. Security is mentioned. The specific section is around minute 15.
Anyone talking about "fax security" is another monk of security through obscurity. Phone line can be listened, fax can be hacked[1] and, most of the time, the fax is the copier and everyone in the building has access to it.
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 enjoyed the story and yay for him then read after the end, "Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay..."!?!?! What does what the author does in the bedroom have to do with the story I just read? Nothing. I don't give a damn what the author does in their bedroom.
People love to talk about themselves. The internet and social media accelerated the narcissistic character of our society.
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.