The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
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It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally, rather than the rules and constraints that employee is forced to use.
Probably fair to comment on the interaction, whether the person was rude, and so on. But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing.
As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.
I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!
As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!
To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.
They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.
Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention.
Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.
Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.
I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.
You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.
They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.
This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.
It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.
government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"
While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.
"The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers.
And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on.
In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification.
What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality.
So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works.
In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.
In other words, my P(real) > 0.99.
Edit: Yep, appears I have it wrong. Thanks for the pointers. The non-fiction tag missed my eye.
For example, it's the same for the DailyWTF... I remember how that would be posted here or on a programming reddit and half the comments would be about how it hadn't happened, and you know, maybe whoever wrote those particular words is just making it up, but I've seen enough just in my little tiny slice of human behavior phase space to know that either the story or something indistinguishably close to it most certainly has happened somewhere, at some time.
"and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
extra weird, because you are the third person that has experienced this bug where you can only paste the first half of that exact sentence.
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.
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.
They work for United Healthcare!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth...
Imagine you run a cash only cafe and one of your baristas starts accepting payment via paypal as a convenience to your customers. Your customers would totally dig it and see it as the morally right thing to do. You however might see some justified problems with it.
If a government office cannot accept pdfs due to policy, the policy is at fault, not the person forced to carry it out. We do not want to live in a world where office clerks make there own rules and ignore policy, based on their subjective morality, with the exception of rejecting or subverting obviously morally wrong extreme policies. Not accepting PDFs is not extreme, it is just bullshit.
Perhaps it's irrational, but I have this viceral feeling that refuses to allow me to believe that people don't have agency.
Who is her manager? Tell them how stupid this is! When they say "there's nothing I can do about it", then talk to their manager!
I recently left Chase bank due to this same kind of helpless attitude they have toward you. And then they ask "have I addressed all of your problems today?" lol
Chase knows this, and while many of their employees may not be empowered to go off script, the bank sees when people leave, and often does hear what those employees have to say when it comes to customer complaints.
The mid-level bureaucrat at the disability office doesn't care about any of that, because they have a monopoly on what they do. You either work with them on their terms, or you don't get what you need.
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.
If Karen from Compliance cared, she could (and should) inform her superiors of what just happened. Let them know how much their procedure cost, in time and money. Call the IT people and say "I have a fax machine printing 500 pages". Get it noted somewhere. Reported. Make statistics out of it.
It can be as simple as an e-mail. Or she can send the entire stack of pages as a souvenir. If she cannot be bothered to do anything about it, then maybe it's not such a problem for her after all.
But keeping silent about it, is being complicit.
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.
Of course not. They sign up to be cops to get paid to do that
And it's probably for a dumb reason, like the IT department doesn't want to deal with security issues around email attachments, or doesn't want to build and maintain a web-based portal where people can upload their documents.
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
But this is exactly what she chooses to do every morning.
"I have the documents in PDF format"
Yes, life is hard, but surely we can bear our troubles in a way that don't make others harder to bear. Or at least aim your troubles at someone who has any power at all to change things! Find a better way to fight the system, that isn't just stabbing other people trapped in the box with you
You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.
I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.
From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.
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.
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.
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.
If there's any class of individual in whom I'm willing to place greater than average trust in their ability to read vocal tones, it's probably blind people. Just sayin'.
1. Whenever I am dealing with a problem, I always try to say to the person helping me "I know you are not the person responsible for my issue." My goal is to help them not feel that my frustration is directed at them.
2. Government is a special area, especially when it comes to benefits, because a lot of regulations are in place because some random politician got a law passed/amended in order to convince their constituents they were fighting fraud and laziness. This is quite often done with no thought to the downstream effects.
3. I consider myself to be an empathetic person, but there have been times in my life when I have had to work in a job that was very anti-customer. Because doing nice things for customers was punished, I fell into a pattern of finding ways to not do nice things for customers and actually got some enjoyment out of the logical puzzle of denying them. I'm not defending it by any means and I'm quite regretful about it, but I can understand how someone can fall into that mentality.
4. I believe the real failure here, like so many other things, is the system design. The disability benefits system in the author's case seems to be providing benefits to permanently disabled and temporarily disabled people. The review process should be differentiating between these two groups. As the author points out, they are never not going to be blind.
I think a better way to communicate the frustration would have been finding the fax number for the minister responsible for the government department and faxing THEM the documentation, as they have the power to change things.
This simple sentence that shows empathy to the person on the other side of the line is so profound. In a single breath you let the other person be heard, be seen, and appreciated. At the worst, it makes you stand out amongst all the abusive asshats they interact with day to day. It makes them want to help you. I've used this line every time I had to deal with a customer service agent and the voice always softened after that. A simple "thank you", or "take your time" seem to mark you as a person, rather than a case to close.
1. Author was made to pay for the bureaucracy and a rigid rule, and found a way to revert that. Now Karen pays the price for the bureaucracy. In the end Author made it a 0 sum game while there was not necessarily a need... and yet fair is fair, he was entered in the game without asking, and he played it.
2. > She has no power, absolutely no power
I doubt if this is true. In the end she said "fine we'll mark the file as updated" while having received only partially what Author sent. This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
In the end I'm not sure if it was worth making someone else suffer, there was probably that 2 pages file that they needed to send, which would have been enough to send everyone on their merry way. Beyond just creating suffering to someone else, that could have very well ended with "fine, we'll review those 500 pages, I'm not sure if we can do that by the deadline".
This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
Now with AI the screening could be better, but in general every letter has to be read because often people in need of immediate support write very evil things. Think of a dehydrated and irate senior caught in their attic. In a last ditch effort they mail the mayor a racist scree, but they do in fact need help or they will die.
There are lots of people in the government actually trying to help you, despite how depressing their job is
There should be a political call to action here. Call xyz or work to change this law. Bureaucrats run on laws. Laws can be changed. I was able to get my local HOA to accept pdf uploads just be talking with them. Small example but change is possible. Not as fun as ruining someones day though
A real problem in both benefits claiming and immigration systems is that there are voters on the other side loudly demanding that the system be made more hostile and kafkaesque.
Does this author live in a country where the government staff has incentive to reject the dole? Some kind of KPI? Otherwise why the author assume this woman is actively trying to stop him from getting his benefit?
I genuinely wonder that. In my country I've never heard that.
The UK disability system is notorious for compliance hurdles. Quite a lot of people including relatives of mine have had claims denied by the bureaucracy, applied for review (which is done by an external judge), and had it reinstated.
It was even worse when the system was outsourced to ATOS.
I've also heard stories about the Norwegian NAV. I don't think this is confined to any one country.
It's not hard to understand. There's constant political budget pressure, and narratives about "scoungers". So the system gets set to default-deny and told to limit the cost of claims by any means necessary.
It’s commonly practiced and we can see why.
In short, the answer to complacency isn't "more complacency".
But having worked in large orgs in highly regulated and bureaucratic sectors (aerospace), sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly.
Policy like "we can't accept email for security purposes" comes from total fucking morons in sub-C level upper management who have no insight into how the business actually works, for whom it's easier to say "no" than it is to say "yes".
It's entirely plausible that this episode (which I bet blew through a lot of PPNS budget in toner) caused some mid level manager to report the process breakage, kicking off a review of whether they really need fax.
This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.
These sorts of don't hate the cogs hate the machine takes are worthless because they create an instant exploit where the machine can be as bad as it wants as long as it hides behind the cogs.
The exploit is already there whether or not you blame the cogs. Did blaming the cogs in this instance solve anything? Are disability benefits reformed in any way?
These types of problems usually persist because it's hard to know who is responsible. It's not just the customer support person or the president/governor - I assume the invisible senior leaders in-between hold a lot of power.
I'd happily support an investigative journalist who exposed exactly why these problems exist and which individual humans are responsible.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and this is the sort of thing that might make Karen suggest to her boss that they accept PDF files.
I'm not sure what state or country this was written in, but requiring physical copies or a fax is very likely a legal requirement.
Also how could she just decide that the disability status is accepted without checking the documents. That is just fraud...
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.
It's amazing how we still haven't learnt that.
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.
The OP's point was that the "faceless" bureaucrat may be helpless and the smug emotion the original author implied may not be unfounded. I can see a valid point for both.
never blame anyone for anything
Assigning blame, via agency or otherwise, and the associated social or legal consequences are additional signals in the environment that influence and change behavior.
If the actions of an individual were involved in propagating some chain of events, then it's perfectly valid to respond to their involvement, via social stigma, punishment, etc, regardless of whether or not there is "agency". The knowledge and anticipation of a similar response changes future actor's behavior, with or without free will.
This discussion itself is exactly an example of this in practice. If there's no such thing as agency, then us talking about what someone should or shouldn't do, given whether there is free will, have any influence on anything, except that it does because interacting with these ideas themselves change behavior, with or without free will.
This is what people mean when they say we should just ignore the question of free will entirely, because it doesn't really factor into how we should design the social contract.
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.
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?
Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.
I believe the primary concern has been while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.
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.
This is an indictment of email more than anything.
Doesn’t that only apply to covered entities, which the internet is telling me does not include the Social Security Administration.
This is called "Individual Right of Access". If you ask a doctor to email your records to your personal Gmail, the doctor must comply. However, they are required to briefly warn you that email is unencrypted and insecure. Once you say, "I understand the risk, send it anyway," the doctor is no longer liable for any breach that happens during transmission.
“Hello sir, before we get started, for security measures, please provide this information about your account”
Hmm I dont have this on hand, let me log in to my account and look at the settings and read it verbatim back to you, proving I’m not compromising this user at all
“Thank you, sir!”
Fun fact, traditionally, police officers are called upon to use their discretion over blind enforcement. The mechanized enforcement of law, historically, has never done any favors for society.
My sister has a job somewhat like this for a school system. Multiply the number of working hours by the number of workers, divide by the number of active cases and the number of hours each case takes to resolve. The answer is that a large number of cases will not be done by their deadlines.
If someone wanted to send her a 500 page fax, she’s just going to shrug and work on something else. If she gives it even a passing thought, it would be “this ass better hope his fax finishes printing before the deadline for benefit cutoff”
I get that this is exhausting, but the rank-and-file employee is just doing their job. This is like people attacking McDonalds employees because they were out of Szechuan Sauce [0].
The author _clearly_ had a way to accomplish their goal. Why could they not just say "ok that's inconvenient, but I'll just use this online service to send my existing PDF".
[0]: https://www.nme.com/features/tv-features/rick-and-mortys-sze...
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.
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... doesn't sound like an absurd practice at all. There are curable disabilities. And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology. It sounds about right to review the situation every a few years.
True, but it should be obvious in 99% of cases if a condition is lifelong.
>And what's curable changes along with the advance of technology.
Very rarely tbh.
I can't think of a single lifelong condition that was cured in the last decade.
Even then it should be trivial to only review cases when a cure is available, by searching the database for people with that condition.
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.
The demand that poor blind people acquire and submit records through an obscure technology, at their own personal expenses, on short deadline, is obviously absurd.
In particular, the requirement to re-prove basic facts suggests a fundamentally hostile design - you could just ask them to send a simple email asserting that yes, they are still disabled; or have them check a box and return a form.
Is there's truly an epidemic of people staying on welfare after their lifelong disability was cured?
This might not be the right frequency, though, and only accepting post/fax is bullshit. Doubly so for short deadlines.
(I'm blind myself.)
The tone is so "I'm smarter than everyone else and I'm dealing with idiots", and it's just incredibly immature.
> to prove that I—a man who has been blind since birth—am, in fact, still blind
Plenty of disabilities can be temporary. And rather than argue about which are permanent and which are temporary and where to draw the line, it's entirely reasonable to ask everyone to just resubmit documentation every 5-7 years.
The author is writing as if "Karen" was coming up with these policies herself, and is choosing to spite her personally. It's incredibly sad. Karen is presumably just a poor woman doing her best to do her job within a system she can't change either. She can't personally make an exception to allow documentation by e-mail. So why on earth would you take all of this out on her?
It's just really sad that this person thinks they're somehow "winning" or "getting back" at the system. They're not helping anything, just spreading misery. Maybe some people read this and think it's a great revenge story or something -- I read it and I just feel pity for the author that they think there's anything good about the way they acted.
I mean, why not take a minute to think about the 30 other people who needed to fax in documentation that day and couldn't, because this one person wanted to jam the machine and use up all its toner. What if the author's sabotage was responsible for other people missing their benefits?
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.
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.
Faxes have been "obsolete" a really long time.
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?
Or semi-fiction? The author is actually blind and tagged it nonfiction, but I suspect some embellishment.
> but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author.
When I'm frustrated talking with an agent of a big organization, I try to remember they probably didn't set the policy. But I also expect them to express some empathy for how I'm negatively affected by that policy. The author/protagonist, accurately or not, felt the opposite from "Karen from compliance". In their shoes, I wouldn't feel much empathy for Karen in return.
> The spam should go to the person in charge
I also expect the agent to have a closer relationship with "the person in charge" than I do (none whatsoever). If I mention the policy is absurd, they could at least make some effort to pass that along to their manager.
Also, sending the information to the agent is necessary compliance, even if the volume is malicious.
> not the person who is forced to deal with this every day
Maybe they feeling a bit of the pain themselves might make them more likely to speak up. If this becomes a miserable job that no one will stay in, that might provoke a change.
Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good.
Most of these bureaucrats have more power than what they want to let us think, but that means taking the risk of being told off for having been kind.
I tried to delete my account on GitHub. I could not. The gdpr compliance email address they provide happily accepts emails but my account is still there, after more than 3 months.
Why am I writing this here? To show you an example of being powerless to the system. The only things I can do is things you can call "petty", like wearing a "Microsoft employees deserve Gulag" t-shirt. Since I tried many other options and failed multiple times
In the early 2000s, the Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, started a journey from “tax police” to service. This was a radical change that affected every aspect and function of the bureaucracy. It went from far down the list to the second most trusted agency (after the Swedish Armed Forces) in 2023 [1].
As a citizen, the differences are notable. I came to Sweden after the change, and my previous experiences in other countries were very similar to the friction-filled endeavor implied by the author. The people I dealt with were similarly unhelpful, unconcerned, if not downright undermining my efforts to comply.
This is all a result of a system that breeds friction. Citizens and bureaucrats alike simply play their part. Moving to Sweden was an otherworldly experience. My first mistake, and resulting interaction with the agency, was met with compassion and understanding from a bureaucrat who then made an effort to help put things right. It’s hard to describe how radically different the situation felt. Anger, frustration, and helplessness were gone. Instead, I felt like sending flowers to Karin, the bureaucrat (I really should have). I’ve become a better citizen, more likely to comply going forward.
I wish more agencies around the world would take note, especially now, in a world trending toward fewer human interactions and increasing digitalization. Bureaucracies and technology alike should continue to be built to improve collective human experiences, not break us apart.
[1] https://chef.se/artiklar/skatteverkets-forandringsresa-nagra...
Apologies for the poor quality link, my morning Googling wasn't very effective.
What is this about?
I don't know the author, but presumably the blog predates the domain.
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.
Obviously, you can just objectively measure if someone is fully blind. Sure you can pretend, but that's very hard.
On the other hand there's disabilities like anxiety, where the only option is to ask the patient questions that the patient may or may not have already looked up online.
By not splitting the groups you are left with only two very bad options:
A) Everyone gets a regime with a lot checks and rechecks to keep the system affordable and scoped to people who need it.
B) You give everyone a lax, trusty regime that people will immediately start abusing by claiming they have anxiety or so.
No not really. Blindness is a spectrum.
https://www.cnib.ca/en/sight-loss-info/blindness/what-blindn...
No government workers were harmed.
And that's even without considering the security benefit of not receiving files that could be compromised, instead generating a file from an image stream. (Now I'm trying to picture what a daisy chain of exploits would be needed to craft a malicious Fax.)
Now I wonder if this is fiction, even if the person is real and they are blind.
"and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
That's fair criticism, I didn't forget, I just copy pasted the shortest part that seemed relevant. I added it back in. Thanks for noticing.
If the story is true (I know it's labelled 'nonfiction' but c'mon) then likely the only reason the fax spamming worked is because the department policy prevented them from blocking numbers outside of very narrow circumstances.
It’s a lot less paper to have a pdf of the fax emailed.
I was hoping things might be a little bit more advanced elsewhere. It hurts my soul to see people print a document to fax it before throwing it away.
I was going to say it would be nice if you would just choose a fax machine from the print dialogue. You can… if it’s set up. Sigh.
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.
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.
So i asked for its number and sent it lots of completely black pictures. The thermal fax did not like that.
I'm not suggesting that this is any reason to support evil policies but I try to be sympathetic to struggles I may not be aware of.
What I'm trying to say is yeah, she could've taken the risk and stood up and said something. He could've beared the pain and sent the correct documentation. He knows the process by now, he had to have known exactly what he needed to send! And yet he chose to needlessly inflict harm on someone who's choice it wasn't theirs to make. The reality of jobs these days is not a give and take, let's all make the world better by democratizing our decisions type world. It's much much worse.
It doesn't matter what Karen thinks or wants. It doesn't matter if Karen believes the disabled person or not. It doesn't matter if Karen is physically capable of complex thought or not. If Karen breaks the rules for you, you will end up losing your benefits anyway, possibly forced to pay them back, and Karen loses her job.
Public sector employment pays terribly. People don't really do it because they enjoy it.
There is literal law all over that says "This information can't be in an email for privacy reasons". It's not policy, it's law.
Stop harassing low level bureaucrats and learn some damn civics.
Similarly, when I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had zero ability to refund you, to fix a problem, to bend any rule for example to help you with your WIC process, which was utterly miserable. Oh sorry the pamphlet this week says X bread is the only approved one, it doesn't matter that it causes your child GI distress, nobody is allowed to change it.
Vote for people who aren't trying to hurt disabled people and you will have fewer disabled people being hurt. Stop screeching about "Fraud" that doesn't exist if you want it to be easy for people to get the welfare they need.
All attempts to battle fraud will inherently add friction to the process. Find an optimization point that isn't so hostile to human beings.
"He writes fiction where Disabled heroes get their happy endings _and_ nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."
the sentence continues after the "and".
it is also tagged "non-fiction" at the top, as other people have noted.
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.
My wife and I had many troubles (delays due to additional security checks, endless request for documents) in visa and all immigration-related applications in the US. We cannot even find a government official to complain. Email inquires all end up with boilerplate responses. Many agencies do not have phone services, and even if some do, you are connected to an unhelpful call center worker who can only provide generic info and have no permissions to discuss your problems. And lawyers told us we could do little because all the procedures are legitimate. We may (and we did once in the past) sue the government but only after an "unreasonable" delay, at which point much harm is already caused.
This week the US consulate emailed me to ask for official documents about a minor past civil suit against me in China, including "a police certificate", for my visa application. Why the heck does the US visa have anything to do with a civil suit, and in which country does a civil suit involve police?
(Now if LibreOffice could edit PDFs decently... My tax accountant sent me a PDF to fill in, but LibreOffice can't get the text and the lines to line up.)
And then near the end of like the 3rd one was text that wasn't cut from the TTS engine... "Claude can make mistakes"
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.
Interesting misconception in 2026.
Of course if you read on, it's clear the story is embellished.
A fax is very useful to bureaucracies because it is hard to prove a fax was ever sent or received at all. It might never arrived and wasn't retried, might have been printed as empty pages, maybe someone else picked it up.
This is why it is so useful when someone on the other end wants to delay (the equivalent of closing a bug as can't reproduce). This is why governments like faxes and why this story is so unlikely (no chance anyone will call back in that event)
Online fax services that are used by medical or government offices almost always generate digital logs that track when a document was sent, who sent it, and who received it, for regulatory purposes
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was also digital.
> I imagined Karen’s fax machine. It was probably an old, beige beast sitting in the corner of a gray office. It was likely low on paper. It was almost certainly low on patience.
I think the rest of the article was also their imagination.
> "Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."
People only speak like this in fan-fiction.
And there being an actual printer is even less likely. Even back in 2008, it was almost impossible to find an actual fax machine, even though businesses had fax numbers, they stopped needing machines.
I'm sure he deals with a lot of crap every day and I'm sure there's a grain of truth in this, but it's pure make believe. But it probably made him feel better writing it and he probably gets some clicks and some followers, so in the end it was probably a reasonable tradeoff. But anyone who thinks in 2026 that an office (government, private corp, etc.) has a stupid 9600 baud paper-eating fax machine spitting out pages is not living in the real world.
Yes, I realize there will be cynics who say "The difficulty is by design to deny benefits", but I also think a lot of well meaning policies are hamstrung by the implementation (especially of software). Claude + Code for America can fix this.
https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...
> 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.
If it were India, you have to pay a 'tax', mostly directly to the bureaucrat or using the workflow setup by the bureaucrat -- its another person outside 'taking care' of these things or his security guard/watchman or another low level employee. It can't be done remotely, you have to go to office and figure out the workflow and the right person. Most third world countries have some version of this configuration.
In US, there are lawyers who get you disability, no problem, they take care of everything for you, and take 50%. Millions of people are on fake disability thanks to these kind lawyers.
Ultimately, most people in Govt (politicians/bureaucrats) are entitled to ALL the money that Govt collects (steals?), and they have different ways of collecting their money. This is just human nature. The Trump regime shows the most innovative ways of doing this, it is quite admirable.
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.
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.
Sorry, but faxes don’t work like this.
A fax takes in the entire transmission over the phone line, ends the call, and then - IF it has been set up to do so, instead of just storing the fax - it prints it out.
Which means that Karen had every ability to tell her fax to stop the print job herself. A fax is not like a printer, where the sender has the ability to tell the printer to pause or cancel the job. Once the fax starts printing, that original communication - the phone call with the fax transmission - has long since ended.
And if this fax machine can retrieve faxes from a fax server elsewhere on the network or on the Internet, that communications disconnect is even more severe.
Which makes me very suspicious of the entire story.
When you get a certain drone with a certain way of speaking down to you ("this is the system obviously, you faceless person who is just as dumb as all the other faceless people"), then it's infuriating and I can see why OP went to bureaucratic war.
At the same time, give the drone a break. She's doing what she's been trained to do, in the framework she's permitted to operate in, and she's got bigger problems than you.
When I was younger, I went to similar bureaucratic wars to prove a point... to whom? What for?
It's not helping anybody.
I’m 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.
I remember using it and worrying about losing the EIN at the last step, so I saved the document several times and printed it several times too.
Their fax machine doesn’t always work. No way to email.
One must go through snail mail and it takes months to get an EIN.
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.
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.
It also appears to be a confession of intentional vandalism of government property, despite the author admitting that they already knew how to send a fax via website, which is as convenient as email.
And, believe it or not, yes, some people do in fact receive treatment that cures a disability.
I’m a bit surprised they haven’t migrated to digital fax reception a long time ago.
>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
20 years ago I worked for a client that had a fax to exchange connector, any mailbox could send a fax from outlook[2] and they had linked fax numbers to group mailbox so that each department had their own fax numbers.
1 : https://blog.checkpoint.com/security/faxploit-hp-printer-fax... 2 : It was always fun to analyze fax sending errors because someone wanted to send a funny video to a fax number.
I’m being partly facetious, but I have started to hear some theories from likely heterodox psychologists about new scute forms of personality disorder developing, particularly among younger generations. Not sure how much there is to the theory.