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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
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".
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
> 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.
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.
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).
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 fighting back (and usually winning).
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> "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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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
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”
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
> 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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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!
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.
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".
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".
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)
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.
I'd say that is likewise for treating your customer as a nuisance instead of taking the time to explain the circumstance.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
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.
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
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".
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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 fighting back (and usually winning).
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/
[delayed]
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Yeah and wayyy more importantly cops don't get fired for not escalating and killing a guy!
and likewise, "hate the cogs" takes are equally worthless. All nuance is lost, the cycle repeats again.
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 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.
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.
> "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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.
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
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
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?
> 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.
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
>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.
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 concern is 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 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?
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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
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.
And then everybody, including the fax machine, stood up and clapped.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Great read. While I admire the spite, I question the wisdom of pissing off a government employee with the power to deny your benefits.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
I love malicious compliance, but it's more fun when you suffer along with them.
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.
Take a job helping the disabled claim benefits they said. It'll be nice and you can help disabled people they said.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 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.
entirely AI generated
https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...
Inspiring, Nietzchean even.
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.
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.
This is proof that you don't need vision to create a thing of beauty.
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.
Yea, the front service desk worker doesn't deserve that shit. Dick move.
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
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 hope this didn't really happen, but I loved reading it.
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.