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.

• GlenTheMachine

  last Friday at 5:31 PM

  “ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally”

  As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…

  • BloondAndDoom

    last Friday at 5:33 PM

    This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude

  • watwut

    last Friday at 6:11 PM

    But we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not.

    They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.

    • evanjrowley

      last Friday at 9:23 PM

      Agree that this is a very messy situation.

      Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention.

      Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.

  • jiggawatts

    yesterday at 3:12 AM

    Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc.

    Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.

    I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!

    As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!

  • observationist

    last Friday at 6:24 PM

    People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can.

    Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

    I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.

    You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.

    They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.

    This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.

    • sellmesoap

      last Friday at 6:40 PM

      >Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

      While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.

      • cineticdaffodil

        yesterday at 2:30 PM

        You have the same phenomena in mega coorps. They would for a internal promotion point place the externalities cost of half an hour of work on all of mankind.

      • observationist

        last Friday at 9:49 PM

        For sure - culture is a huge component. Government is unique in that incompetence and laziness and all the shitty behaviors that get people canned in the real world don't have an impact on money coming in. In some places, revenue increases steadily, completely decoupled from any sort of functional attachment to value.

        So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.

        If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.

        You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.

        Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.

    • metalliqaz

      last Friday at 6:31 PM

      > with no market feedback

      It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.

      government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"

      • observationist

        last Friday at 6:49 PM

        Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional.

        When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.

        Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.

        They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.

        Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.

        What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.

        • alibarber

          last Friday at 7:18 PM

          I thought the “performance reviews” they were alluding to were elections.

          Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.

      • gravypod

        last Friday at 10:19 PM

        > government employees work for elected officials

        This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:

        1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)

        2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)

        3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments

        I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.

        • metalliqaz

          yesterday at 2:31 PM

          Do you think the President isn't an elected official?

          the fact that the public is stupid does not mean there is no feedback

      • hunterpayne

        yesterday at 12:38 AM

        I have to fill out paperwork for the government on a regular basis. I can tell you from first hand experience, the government's main problems are completely their own fault. They are easily 25 years out of date in technology. They can't accept encrypted files, they can't accept credit cards, they can't seem to even do the most basic things that even my dentist's office with 2 total employees can seem to do.

        Its so bad that I can't help but think its because the contracts to support government workers are handed out in questionable ways. While I don't think much of the people who work in government offices, I do think they could accept emails if their bosses wanted them to and their contractors provided the tech. They aren't any more or less capable than the dentist's office workers. They just have to work with terrible tech that was clearly chosen for the wrong reasons.

      • mlrtime

        yesterday at 10:17 AM

        LOL government employees and "at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews""

        And you are criticizing half the country based on a ideology? These employees are at almost no risk of losing their jobs because someone calls their representative to complain, this is fantasy.

  • geysersam

    last Friday at 10:19 PM

    In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

    • GlenTheMachine

      last Friday at 10:44 PM

      It's more complicated than that.

      "The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers.

      And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on.

      In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification.

      What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality.

      So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works.

      In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.

      • atoav

        last Friday at 11:43 PM

        I know for a fact that in my institution (a university) certain things can't be done by sending a pdf because the guidence our adminstration is accountable to (city, state, national) mandates them to have it in paper. All clerks I have talked to find that silly, but they can't change it and since they have to proof things to these superior offices one cannot expect them to forge these document for you as a service.

        There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.

• miki123211

  last Friday at 1:52 PM

  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.

  • tyingq

    last Friday at 2:06 PM

    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.

    • latexr

      last Friday at 2:24 PM

      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.

    • jerf

      last Friday at 3:04 PM

      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.

      • Barbing

        today at 5:21 AM

        Representative? Believe that or “representation” is used in marketing, like for renders.

        This cannot be the best word…

    • john_strinlai

      last Friday at 2:34 PM

      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.

• unsupp0rted

  last Friday at 3:10 PM

  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.

  • ryandrake

    last Friday at 3:58 PM

    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.

• nickff

  last Friday at 4:53 PM

  I've heard this justification many times, but it's highly questionable. Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis; is this morally justifiable? What if their 'job description' does not include 'murder', but they do indeed have to murder an innocent person each month because of the 'rules and constraints'? What if instead of occasional murder, they just have to subject many innocent people to suffering because of 'the rules and constraints'?

  • autoexec

    last Friday at 5:19 PM

    > Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis;

    Several large corporations really are guilty of murdering innocent people on a regular basis. Even still, if you find a low wage worker in that company's mail room and beat the shit out of them to make yourself feel better it's you who are the asshole, and it does nothing to stop the killing.

  • idle_zealot

    last Friday at 5:10 PM

    This isn't a hypothetical, you're just describing social murder. What do people do about it? Usually shower the perpetrators with money and peace prizes.

  • something765478

    last Friday at 9:13 PM

    Following your organization's data security practices is not immoral. To me, refusing to accept a PDF is no different than running a cash only store and refusing to accept credit cards as payment.

    • hunterpayne

      yesterday at 12:45 AM

      And how long would that store stay open with such a policy? That's the problem. The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less. Its hard to believe it is just the bureaucrats. I think the leaders of those parts of the government didn't get their posts from merit. And they have no idea just how bad they are at their jobs. It also is probably a bit of too many cooks in the kitchen too.

      • modriano

        yesterday at 6:22 PM

        > The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less.

        The US government manages a more diverse array of problems (critical, life and death problems) than any other US organization (and probably more than any other org in the world). Amazon has only a tiny fraction of the competence of the US government and is not nearly as reliable. Remember the last time a significant portion of the social security system went down? I can't, but I can remember the last time AWS went down.

  • testing22321

    yesterday at 1:07 AM

    Wait, I know this one.

    They work for United Healthcare!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth...

  • UltraSane

    last Friday at 5:28 PM

    That is war.

  • atoav

    last Friday at 11:53 PM

    Murder is one thing, some superior telling you you cannot accept random PDFs sent to you via email for whatever reason and you following that policy is another.

    Imagine you run a cash only cafe and one of your baristas starts accepting payment via paypal as a convenience to your customers. Your customers would totally dig it and see it as the morally right thing to do. You however might see some justified problems with it.

    If a government office cannot accept pdfs due to policy, the policy is at fault, not the person forced to carry it out. We do not want to live in a world where office clerks make there own rules and ignore policy, based on their subjective morality, with the exception of rejecting or subverting obviously morally wrong extreme policies. Not accepting PDFs is not extreme, it is just bullshit.

• hrimfaxi

  last Friday at 1:37 PM

  The person is an agent of the system. That they bear the brunt of the reaction is the system working as intended.

  • tyingq

    last Friday at 1:41 PM

    I guess. Faxing it to someone involved in why the rules are that way would be more satisfying to me.

    • madaxe_again

      last Friday at 1:45 PM

      You can fax your congressman.

• ccorcos

  last Friday at 10:21 PM

  > But blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly. They are not empowered to do that kind of thing.

  Perhaps it's irrational, but I have this viceral feeling that refuses to allow me to believe that people don't have agency.

  Who is her manager? Tell them how stupid this is! When they say "there's nothing I can do about it", then talk to their manager!

  I recently left Chase bank due to this same kind of helpless attitude they have toward you. And then they ask "have I addressed all of your problems today?" lol

  • kelnos

    yesterday at 10:41 AM

    You have a choice when it comes to where you do your banking. You don't have a choice when it comes to where you get your disability benefits.

    Chase knows this, and while many of their employees may not be empowered to go off script, the bank sees when people leave, and often does hear what those employees have to say when it comes to customer complaints.

    The mid-level bureaucrat at the disability office doesn't care about any of that, because they have a monopoly on what they do. You either work with them on their terms, or you don't get what you need.

• wyldfire

  last Friday at 5:42 PM

  > blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly.

  I definitely agree - but if the organization creates pain as an externality, then there's no incentive for them to change. Making them realize the cost of their decisions seems appropriate and just and not-even-abusive. Yelling at the person on the phone is bad and doesn't help anyone. Malicious compliance like this helps motivate them to escalate their concerns to people who can change the policy.

  • edwcross

    last Friday at 8:58 PM

    Indeed.

    If Karen from Compliance cared, she could (and should) inform her superiors of what just happened. Let them know how much their procedure cost, in time and money. Call the IT people and say "I have a fax machine printing 500 pages". Get it noted somewhere. Reported. Make statistics out of it.

    It can be as simple as an e-mail. Or she can send the entire stack of pages as a souvenir. If she cannot be bothered to do anything about it, then maybe it's not such a problem for her after all.

    But keeping silent about it, is being complicit.

• raybb

  last Friday at 2:46 PM

  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.

  • aetch

    last Friday at 3:58 PM

    DOGE was meant to do the opposite

• idontwantthis

  last Friday at 4:28 PM

  The most unreal part is Karen calling him back. I never get called back by anyone in any office anymore.

• last Friday at 3:20 PM

• James_K

  last Friday at 3:35 PM

  She could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.

• InsideOutSanta

  last Friday at 2:07 PM

  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.

  • kelnos

    yesterday at 10:46 AM

    It's probably not actually politicians in this case. It is highly unlikely that "no PDFs as proof of disability" is written in any law anywhere. It's almost certainly a policy developed by the agency at hand, by career government employees, not elected officials or political appointees.

    And it's probably for a dumb reason, like the IT department doesn't want to deal with security issues around email attachments, or doesn't want to build and maintain a web-based portal where people can upload their documents.

  • dwedge

    last Friday at 2:17 PM

    > 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

    • InsideOutSanta

      last Friday at 3:27 PM

      "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?

      • dwedge

        last Friday at 4:07 PM

        A couple of years ago I changed the address on my car but didn't receive the documentation and didn't realise for a few months. Then I realised the tax was due and I hadn't had a reminder or this paperwork - one of which is needed to tax it.

        I phoned them and they said I need to pay for the new documentation because I had a time limit to report it undelivered. Fine, that's my fault, but I need to tax it now otherwise I'll get fined, and I have no way to do it. I asked her how to do it and she said there is "no way" she can tax it over the phone I need to wait for the documentation. I told her I'll get fined and she said there is no way to tax it over the phone unless I have the VIN number which I won't have. Sorry, there's nothing she can do.

        I told her I actually have the VIN number to hand, does she want me to read it for her? Suddenly she didn't need it and just needed card details. The impossible bureaucratic process was suddenly gone now. She just hadn't wanted to help.

        Was this woman just following the law? Was it the fault of the politicians? Me, as a voter? She had no other choice than refusing to help?

        • InsideOutSanta

          last Friday at 4:21 PM

          "Was this woman just following the law?"

          I don't know what the law is, so I don't know if she was.

          "Was it the fault of the politicians? Me, as a voter? She had no other choice than refusing to help?"

          Based on my experience, I'll guess that her office was understaffed and she was overworked, and her performance was judged on how quickly she ends calls.

          Dunno if that's your fault. Who do you vote for? People who promise to cut budgets and taxes? Then yes, it was partly your fault.

      • capr

        last Friday at 7:50 PM

        > Do you disagree that this person followed the law, and that politicians enacted those laws, and that we voted for these politicians?

        This is the definition of brainwashing. You had a false choice between person A and person B who are mostly the same some 4 years ago, and now _you_ are responsible for every stupid policy they enact.

    • 0x3f

      last Friday at 2:37 PM

      > 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?

      • dwedge

        last Friday at 4:01 PM

        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.

        • 0x3f

          last Friday at 4:22 PM

          > The only experience I can have is personal.

          Right, and the point was that personal observations and impressions are a really poor way to judge the internal thoughts, feelings and motivations of random strangers. I.e. that nobody could possibly come to this determination in any robust way.

          Moreover, it's exactly the kind of conclusion that suffers from common biases, and that we should be inherently skeptical of.

        • InsideOutSanta

          last Friday at 4:25 PM

          "Assuming that it's a preconception and not observed is a bizarre assumption."

          It's really not, it's basic psychology. People rarely change their opinions based on evidence.

          Having said that, in 50 years on this planet and countless interactions with government employees, I haven't had a single bad one. I do try to be kind and accommodating because I know their jobs are often shit and they have to deal with asshats all day long, and maybe that has an impact on how they treat me.

    • iso1631

      last Friday at 2:34 PM

      Nobody enjoys working in a call centre

      • tryauuum

        last Friday at 3:45 PM

        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

      • dwedge

        last Friday at 4:06 PM

        This is a bit of a strawman. Not all customer facing roles are call centres, and not all bureaucracy actually comes from above.

        I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago I changed the address on my car but didn't receive the documentation and didn't realise for a few months. Then I realised the tax was due and I hadn't had a reminder or this paperwork - one of which is needed to tax it.

        I phoned them and they said I need to pay for the new documentation because I had a time limit to report it undelivered. Fine, that's my fault, but I need to tax it now otherwise I'll get fined, and I have no way to do it. I asked her how to do it and she said there is "no way" she can tax it over the phone I need to wait for the documentation. I told her I'll get fined and she said there is no way to tax it over the phone unless I have the VIN number which I won't have. Sorry, there's nothing she can do.

        I told her I actually have the VIN number to hand, does she want me to read it for her? Suddenly she didn't need it and just needed card details. The impossible bureaucratic process was suddenly gone now. She just hadn't wanted to help.

        I'm baffled that people in this thread are acting like almost everyone hasn't had a similar experience at one time or another.

        • InsideOutSanta

          last Friday at 4:28 PM

          > I'm baffled that people in this thread are acting like almost everyone hasn't had a similar experience at one time or another.

          Nobody is saying that. Government employees have bad days, too, and some are probably just assholes. That's a far cry from saying malicious stuff like "bureaucrats fall into a position they enjoy. They often seem to take a perverse pride in this job."

  • egorfine

    last Friday at 5:21 PM

    > I don't think this woman is happy to have to enforce this idiotic law

    But this is exactly what she chooses to do every morning.

• create_accounts

  last Friday at 3:37 PM

  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

  • sl-1

    last Friday at 8:32 PM

    Not end to end encrypted? I'd wager most email traffic is encrypted while in transit, but of course that depends on the service providers. And it does sit unencrypted when stored.

    • hunterpayne

      yesterday at 12:48 AM

      If you are emailing from a Yahoo address to a GMail address, I would bet it is. If it is going to some .gov address, who knows...maybe...maybe not???

      • subscribed

        yesterday at 4:45 AM

        Easy to check if you were curious.

        telnet to the mail server on the relevant port, either ssl, or TLS, or stattls.

        You'll know :)

  • last Friday at 5:57 PM

• cucumber3732842

  last Friday at 1:58 PM

  >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.

  • tyingq

    last Friday at 2:11 PM

    It may read that way to you. It does not to me.

  • jrflowers

    yesterday at 12:08 AM

    >nobody signs up to be a cop just to strangle black guys over petty BS

    Of course not. They sign up to be cops to get paid to do that

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"

• wholinator2

  last Friday at 1:58 PM

  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

  • Etherlord87

    last Friday at 2:35 PM

    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.

    • ryandrake

      last Friday at 3:31 PM

      > 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.

      • tracker1

        last Friday at 4:43 PM

        Until one day... Afroman releases a new album.

      • theK

        last Friday at 4:30 PM

        So what is the argument here? That it is irrelevant because there is no critical mass?

        Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?

        • ryandrake

          last Friday at 5:23 PM

          The French Revolution didn't just happen spontaneously from individuals acting individually. You need leadership and coordinated action to change things. A small number of individuals acting individually, yet pushing in the same direction, will never move a needle.

          • theK

            last Friday at 6:08 PM

            Exactly my point. All that (and all the other things needed) did not just materialize out of thin air. It took decades and dozens of failed protests to get to that point.

      • Etherlord87

        last Friday at 4:01 PM

        > 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.

        • card_zero

          last Friday at 4:36 PM

          That's a fun fantasy, but I think in my case it would lead to disappointment. I regularly imagine that I sowed the seed to cause X thing to take off in Y community, but it's going to turn out that it was just the zeitgeist operating every time, and the true role of my mind in influencing others is only that of a conduit, or sewer.

      • bmurphy1976

        last Friday at 3:53 PM

        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.

        • bitwank

          last Friday at 4:04 PM

          Nope. It’s like thinking you can overthrow the government by littering. It’s just being lame. If you’re going to be lame to other people, don’t gloat about your lameness online. “If everybody littered, they’d have to do something about it!”

          • croemer

            last Friday at 4:35 PM

            It's not littering. It shows why fax is stupid and they should accept email. Littering has no such benefit.

            • autoexec

              last Friday at 4:53 PM

              It's needlessly generating excessive amounts of trash and waste. It's wasting tax money. It's hurting the next blind person who won't be able to fax his documents because the machine is down/overloaded. It does not show why fax is stupid. It shows that faxing reams of unnecessary paperwork is stupid. It does not show that they should accept PDFs over email (genuinely a great way to get hacked). There is no benefit in trying to DoS the SSA office.

          • bmurphy1976

            last Friday at 5:02 PM

            You kind of missed my point but that's OK. You can agree with or disagree with the action OP took, I'm not making a judgement call on that.

            What I'm responding to the the notion that "no action you can take matters." Specifically this:

            >Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.

            I just don't believe that. Small actions do matter and are necessary because they enable the big actions later. You have to start somewhere. Even if it feels insurmountable. No major change ever just happened in isolation, it always happens when enough people have had enough and fought back enough that the change was inevitable.

            • ryandrake

              last Friday at 5:27 PM

              What's missing is coordination. Coordinated individuals taking actions together can change things. But just relying on individuals stochastically, randomly acting doesn't work. You can't random-walk your way to political change, even if a lot of people are random-walking in one direction.

              Worker rights didn't just spontaneously appear because enough people wanted them. They came about through organizing, coordinating and leading. Same for Women's suffrage, Civil rights, gay rights...

      • gosub100

        last Friday at 4:34 PM

        Then I'm guessing you don't vote, right? Because one vote makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

        • jjgreen

          last Friday at 4:43 PM

          One vote does, unlikely to be yours though.

      • _DeadFred_

        last Friday at 4:30 PM

        How's Target doing? Zero impact?

        • autoexec

          last Friday at 4:45 PM

          They're still doing business. Every single day. With hundreds of billions in revenue and an increasing number of stores popping up all over the place. Impact can be non-zero and still be not enough to meaningfully change anything.

      • philipallstar

        last Friday at 3:38 PM

        > 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.

        • ryandrake

          last Friday at 3:54 PM

          That's pretty vague. I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but OK.

        • last Friday at 4:33 PM

    • LeifCarrotson

      last Friday at 4:13 PM

      I find it far more effective to make friends with and be kind to that employee, and then describe how I know it isn't their fault but this one aspect of the thing that their company does really sucks, right? They're then able to carry that specific complaint from one of their best customers up the chain.

      There are a thousand reasons why someone might be miserable, might resign or ask for a raise, but at the next monthly meeting or whatever opportunity they have for receiving suggestions, an employee who actually likes you will be more likely to speak up and get something done.

      This has worked for me at least in the B2B space, where I'm affecting one of 50 state applications engineers or something like that. I'm aware that this isn't exactly the same as the federal government that employs like 3 million people, but the principle is the same.

      If you got on Karen's good side, she might grouse with you that sending and receiving faxes is archaic, that mail is slow, agree that printed paper's not that accommodating to blind people, and acknowledge that it's cruel and wasteful to ask people to prove their chronic, incurable disabilities every year under threat of taking away their benefits through these platforms. You could work together and laugh about how funny it would be to communicate the real costs and hardships with her supervisors if you literally faxed 1,200 pages of a PDF, wearing through multiple toner cartridges and reams of paper, generating a box that she could drop on the table with a "thud" to emphasize that they should stop doing that.

      That might create change, especially if it happens for multiple employees multiple times a day.

      Making a bureaucrat miserable because they have a lot of paperwork to do is not going to create change.

      • hooverd

        last Friday at 8:07 PM

        Indeed, if you're nice they might take your side. If you're an asshole, that's a lot less likely.

    • palmotea

      last Friday at 4:55 PM

      > From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.

      No, all you're accomplishing is being an ass to that person. They're a replaceable cog in a machine. And often their role as just as much to be a punching bag for assholes like you, to take the hits instead of who's really responsible, than whatever other business function they're performing. The people responsible aren't idiots, they know what they're going.

      The only thing being an ass to someone who's just a cog accomplishes is making yourself into an asshole.

    • bambax

      last Friday at 3:46 PM

      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.

      • autoexec

        last Friday at 5:02 PM

        > Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans.

        Do you have a citation for that or is that just an idea of a villain you've invented in your head? Karen doesn't hold any power whatsoever over anyone. Karen is a low level employee who has to answer the phones all day. She doesn't decide who gets benefits or not. She didn't create the Continuing Disability Review. She didn't create the security policy that said they should refuse to open PDF attachments from random people who email them. She doesn't need to "get bitten" any more than you do.

      • hooverd

        last Friday at 8:10 PM

        If you're trying to effect actual change that seems like a great way to harden the people you need to be influencing against you.

    • technothrasher

      last Friday at 5:02 PM

      > I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.

      If you're talking about Matthew 10, I think you read that bible passage exactly backward. Jesus was saying not to worry about any persecution caused by following him, because the responsibility is not yours. They are really persecuting him, "the master", and if you just keep doing what he says you will come out on top, even if you are killed, and they will get theirs in the end.

      (Not that I agree. As an atheist, it feels coercive. But that's clearly what Matthew 10 is saying)

    • jt2190

      last Friday at 4:17 PM

      > if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.

      Perhaps, but the question to ask is not “how to apply some pressure” but “how to apply pressure in the place where it’s most effective.

    • watwut

      last Friday at 3:16 PM

      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.

      • callmeal

        last Friday at 3:47 PM

        >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.

        • autoexec

          last Friday at 5:07 PM

          I highly doubt it. Not accepting PDF files from random email addresses that send to your very publicly listed email address is a smart policy. One angry jerk trying to DoS the fax machine is not going to change the policy. At best, it'd cause them to ditch the paper and toner and upgrade so that all incoming faxes are automatically scanned and sent to an email box.

      • cortesoft

        last Friday at 4:43 PM

        > We are on HN. People who are responsible for overreaching unreasonable security rules ... are basically us.

        I don’t think that is true. Rules that you have to use a fax machine are enshrined in outdated laws. No IT professional is going to say to use a fax machine for security.

        The same thing is true for a lot of security practices. Our company had silly password rotation policies because of certification requirements, not because our IT team thought it was necessary.

        • autoexec

          last Friday at 5:09 PM

          > No IT professional is going to say to use a fax machine for security.

          An IT professional will say don't open PDF files from every random email that comes into your publicly posted email address though.

      • trinsic2

        last Friday at 3:22 PM

        Disagree. Employees need to be responsible and make their voices heard. The whole thing was justified. We enable nightmares with our acquiescence.

        • perching_aix

          last Friday at 3:24 PM

          And how does the author (or you) know she doesn't keep raising this?

          Edit: can't even confirm that it really is only fax and physical mail that's available; on a cursory search, tackling this fully online is already well possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544562

          • snk

            last Friday at 4:39 PM

            You mean, Karen lied?

            • perching_aix

              last Friday at 5:03 PM

              No, that is not what I meant. If anything, the blogpost author might have, but that's not what I mean either.

              It is entirely possible for both parties to have simply missed thinking of this. Or for me to be missing or misunderstanding something.

      • johnnyanmac

        last Friday at 3:38 PM

        >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.

        • masklinn

          last Friday at 3:53 PM

          > 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.

          • cm11

            last Friday at 5:49 PM

            I sorta feel there's as much fantasy on the other side. The situation as is—the concrete one we're discussing here—exists. You're voting for a version where this person doesn't complain through the methods designed for it and instead writes to the CEO or something and has things fixed that way. Or possibly just doesn't complain about being screwed at all.

            The system is largely bad. That's mostly agreed by each side. I feel like what you're asking for—to treat others as humans—is right and yet only going in one direction. There's a disagreement between the company and the customer and instead of showing up the company disingenuously gives you an unrelated powerless person to speak to. The expectation is that you shouldn't count them as the company, you count them as a human—and you're supposed to do that _because_ the company underpays them and gives them no power.

          • leoedin

            last Friday at 4:15 PM

            If the author didn't abuse the fax, why would anyone notice the process was broken. It's only by abusing the existing process that change will be triggered.

            You see this all the time in cybersecurity. Nobody cares until there's a breach. Nobody would care if he faxed 25 pages and mildly inconvenienced Karen, but by faxing 500 pages and inconveniencing the whole office, it's going to start something. Even if it takes them another 5 years to fix the process, it's a start.

            Realistically, the change will probably be "no more than 25 pages of evidence required". But that's also a win for the person being asked for it.

          • johnnyanmac

            last Friday at 4:05 PM

            I'm open to options. Not doomerism "the system can't be fixed" mentality. I don't like to think of myself as combative. Ideally we get listened to in council and they properly pull what strings are needed to help.

            But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air. Being a nuisance (or letting nature take its course, in the perspective of an employee) is much more powerful to these kinds of organizations than words.

            • masklinn

              last Friday at 5:07 PM

              > But this has been my reality. Employees can evangelize for months for better security, but then a (very avoidable) hack happens and suddenly the budget for it appears out of thin air.

              So your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to. Why, then, are you advocating for harassing front-line low-level employees?

              Go for the people who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.

              And even if you don't have the energy to keep fighting after your own case has been fixed (a very common remedy when it's usually much easier to grease the squeaky wheel than to actually fix the axle), try to leave information on your process and contact points in accessible locations so that those afterwards can start a step or two ahead.

              • johnnyanmac

                last Friday at 5:24 PM

                >your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.

                I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee. It can be the custome, it can be a malicious actor. It can be the federal or state government. But it has to come from outside or up top.

                I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything"

                >Go for the people who can actually set policy: ministers, representatives, council, agency boards, managers. When you call, rather than take it out on the employee request to be transferred up.

                If you've seen local policy these days... Yeah, not really. LA just had a new Metro line approved despite the mayor's attempts to delay the vote. Policy isn't working with us.

                I won't say escalation doesnt work, but I haven't seen it pulled off. Wait queues for help is already so long, so asking more time of the customer might not be feasible. It's already inefficient enough that we need go use Synchronous calls to to do all these duties.

                • masklinn

                  yesterday at 7:30 AM

                  > I'm saying inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee.

                  When you harass an employee it’s still word from an employee. And it’s very optimistic to think said words will go beyond you being an asshole doing asshole things.

                  > I don't know how you construed that as "so customers can't do anything"

                  You seem confused. I never said that, you just invented it from me saying that harassing front line employees is useless.

                  • johnnyanmac

                    yesterday at 7:48 AM

                    I "invented" it from

                    >So your lived experience indicates that harassing front-line low-level employees about it does not work because they won't be listened to.

                    Which somehow got the exsct opposite message I was giving:

                    >inconvenience from an outside force (not the low level employee) gets actions done, not words from the employee.

                    I don't know how you got your conclusion from that message.

    • gosub100

      last Friday at 4:30 PM

      This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.

      • palmotea

        last Friday at 5:02 PM

        > This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.

        Have you heard of pig butchering? Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers: https://www.wired.com/story/the-red-bull-leaks/.

        Immoral assholes can out-immoral you.

        • ahtihn

          yesterday at 10:30 AM

          > Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers:

          Doing crime to save your own life does not excuse the crime.

          They're attemtping to ruin someone else's life to save their own.

        • gosub100

          last Friday at 5:55 PM

          That seems like a problem for the telcos to resolve. I.e. don't allow calls from nations that do this.

          • palmotea

            last Friday at 7:10 PM

            >>> This is exactly what I do with telemarketer scammers. I have no limit of depravity that I draw from in attempt to offend them. No limits. And exactly for the reasons you describe. Get them to crack and quit the company.

            >> Have you heard of pig butchering? Sometimes the "scammer" you're talking to is practically a slave that will be beaten if they don't hit their numbers: https://www.wired.com/story/the-red-bull-leaks/.

            > That seems like a problem for the telcos to resolve. I.e. don't allow calls from nations that do this.

            Yes, telcos have a problem to solve, but that's besides the point. It doesn't justify you being overconfident about who you're actually dealing with or an asshole to someone based on your overconfidence.

            You imagine you're being an asshole to some criminal scammer, but you actually could further mistreating some poor soul who's been trafficked by the criminal scammer.

            People who don't care about the possibility they're mistreating an innocent person are assholes.

            • ahtihn

              yesterday at 10:33 AM

              > an innocent person

              They are absolutely not innocent. They have agency!

              They decided ruining other people's life is better than whatever the consequences are for themselves.

              It's only normal that people they target retaliate.

            • gosub100

              last Friday at 9:14 PM

              I don't care about pig butchers, if thats what you're asking. Your argument is a variant of "Look what you made them do". It's fallacious.

    • card_zero

      last Friday at 4:28 PM

      The Bible of course also says "if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee", which is where I thought you were going with this at first. The Bible says a lot of things.

  • orzig

    last Friday at 2:45 PM

    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.

    • ryandrake

      last Friday at 3:35 PM

      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!

      • kelnos

        yesterday at 11:00 AM

        Isn't it just DHS that's shut down? Presumably the people you were talking to are at the IRS, and they're still getting paid.

  • nxobject

    last Friday at 2:37 PM

    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...

    • axus

      last Friday at 3:05 PM

      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".

      • snk

        last Friday at 4:41 PM

        A couple of possibilities spring to mind. Likelier that Karen lied, but maybe the 512 page fax changed the system.

        • axus

          last Friday at 5:34 PM

          The post dated March 25 2026 says "This week, I received The Letter."

          More likely he had a fun idea and ran with it to illustrate other problems he's had.

          I can say from personal experience that the people on the phone for US Social Security are enforcing inhumane policies. A relative with a speech impediment and in serious pain who was unable to travel to the office for an interview had to be ready for a phone call. If the phone wasn't answered after four rings, have to reschedule a phone call. When the phone call arrived, they had to answer questions personally without assistance or "coaching". The caller couldn't understand the relative due to the speech impediment, and the relative was in distress and having difficulty understanding the questions. But we weren't supposed to help.

  • the__alchemist

    last Friday at 3:16 PM

    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.

  • robflynn

    last Friday at 4:20 PM

    They attacked a fax machine, I don't think it has feelings. The woman will get over her frustration at seeing it print for two hours.

    • kelvinjps10

      last Friday at 4:23 PM

      I also been on the customer service side and it's really annoying getting angry persona after angry person trying to push their frustrations on you for something you have no control.

      • robflynn

        last Friday at 5:21 PM

        Oh, me too. I started out as tech support for a dial up ISP in the 90s. It was rough. I am always polite to customer service. I just feel like it wasn't the lady that was attacked so much as it was the fax machine, the policy, the institution. She had some frustration, but it sounds like he was even polite to her, Didn't yell, didn't call her names or anything. He just opted for malicious compliance.

        You have me thinking about old customer service war stories now, I wanted to share one of the more ridiculous ones. A tornado came through the small town and knocked out the utility lines. Being a dial-up ISP our infrastructure was a bit messed up for a few days. Once it was all squared away we had an angry customer call and yell at us about how we were offline for a few days and how unprofessional it was to not let him know that we were going offline. That he wasn't so much mad we were offline but we should have told him so he could have planned around it. He was yelling so much. I finally just said "sir, next time we schedule a tornado I will be sure to let you know." and he accepted the answer and thanked me. People are so odd.

  • last Friday at 2:38 PM

  • rwmj

    last Friday at 4:22 PM

    In this case the problem can't easily be blamed on "the system". Government benefits are this way because politicians have for years blamed "benefit cheats" and "welfare queens" and other boogymen, people have voted based on this, and now the law is you have to prove you're still congenitally blind every year. The system is working, it's actually doing what the politicians and their voters want.

    • realo

      last Friday at 4:39 PM

      Explain that to the Karen, then... and let her suffer, instead of the poor blind taxpayer.

      He never chose to be blind. He pays his taxes. He is the customer.

      She chose to be part of The System. She is paid to provide a service, within The System's rules.

      I have zero empathy for her. Everything is working as intended.

      • hooverd

        last Friday at 8:13 PM

        Hopefully you feel about the same way about every bit of vitriol levied towards tech workers.

  • john_strinlai

    last Friday at 2:06 PM

    >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.

    • catapart

      last Friday at 2:19 PM

      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.

      • KronisLV

        last Friday at 2:42 PM

        > 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.

        • catapart

          last Friday at 2:59 PM

          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.

          • KronisLV

            last Friday at 6:38 PM

            It's not intended to be a misrepresentation, as much as it is to use exaggeration to call attention to how suggestions like

            > "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."

            might be barking up the wrong tree somewhat.

            Often people will be in any given job because they can't easily get anything else and they just have to make ends meet, and especially in the present circumstance (affordability crisis in a lot of places), I couldn't blame them for being the face of some such machine. Saying that they should quit on principle feels insulting to me, when they often have little to no sway and are treated as disposable cogs in said machine.

            That's why I wouldn't be upset at (or at least wouldn't take it out on) the people enforcing various asinine and straight up bad policies - since that's like blaming a line worker for the price increases of the product they just sell. I think the original post actually gets a lot of that nuance right - societal impact, the human aspect and so on. I don't wholly disagree with it, just that element. Of course, they shouldn't give you attitude either, but there's probably ways to handle that that aren't disruptive to the business continuity and others receiving their services. Ergo my suggestion that everyone in that situation could have handled it better.

            > You are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such.

            It's too easy to take this as a justification that leads to workers being treated like shit for the decisions of their bosses or even someone higher up in an org chart they haven't even met.

            > 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.

            This is okay when it's harmless banter and some camaraderie. This isn't good when you're just sitting there in a call centre with someone who's deeply frustrated and is cursing you out or is looking for an argument - you might even agree with their frustrations, but that doesn't mean that you yourself deserve that. One of my friends worked in one for a few years and there definitely are some stories that made me feel sorry for them.

            I'm probably reading into it too much. Maybe just ask to talk to her manager directly, on the account that they might at least pass it up the chain. At the very least, I do think that it would have been better to send the super long fax mentioned in the post to the person who made that policy, with a note saying "Since security is of utmost importance, I entrust that you will handle the attached documents appropriately!" blow up their fax machine (or their assistant's, for that matter) not the Karen that's just doing her job.

            Of course, there are limits to this - blatantly illegal or inhumane practices should still sway you towards quitting ASAP, but a Karen might not know the first thing about what InfoSec policies are good or not. Or she might genuinely enjoy making people jump through hoops - I don't have enough context here to say anything for certain, but that in general, there should be basic human decency and respect going both ways.

      • noirscape

        last Friday at 2:59 PM

        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".

        • trinsic2

          last Friday at 3:30 PM

          Being paid a low wage doesn't give you a right to mistreat people because of you conditions. There are no justified resentments

          • noirscape

            last Friday at 3:50 PM

            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.

            • trinsic2

              last Friday at 4:55 PM

              Sorry I disagree. Being inhuman in your job by being overly bureaucratic is a thing.

          • johnnyanmac

            last Friday at 3:52 PM

            I'd say that is likewise for treating your customer as a nuisance instead of taking the time to explain the circumstance.

        • catapart

          last Friday at 4:00 PM

          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)

      • gentoo

        last Friday at 2:36 PM

        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/.

        • salawat

          last Friday at 3:47 PM

          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.

    • volkercraig

      last Friday at 4:27 PM

      > if i was in her position, i would shrug and hand my boss the 500 pieces of paper.

      yeah honestly. If I was in that position I'd probably think it's funny and just stick the whole stack in a folder and laugh about the dumb process.

    • mothballed

      last Friday at 2:18 PM

      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.

      • TeMPOraL

        last Friday at 2:29 PM

        > 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.

        • catapart

          last Friday at 2:38 PM

          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.

          • TeMPOraL

            last Friday at 3:12 PM

            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.

            • TheOtherHobbes

              last Friday at 4:39 PM

              The text leans heavily ChatGPT.

              I suspect this is a revenge fantasy rather than something that actually happened.

              As for who's responsible - it's a mix. Some people who deal with these situations are doing their jobs because they have no choice.

              Some are active sadists and do the job because they get to bully the weak.

              This happens a lot in benefits management, and also in immigration, in most countries.

          • canucker2016

            last Friday at 11:07 PM

            The feature is called "unified inbox" - faxes appear as a PDF attachment in an email inbox somewhere.

            If the government department had a unified inbox for emails/faxes accessible by workers, then there wouldn't have been any "pain" in the form of consumables by the fax machine. That was my worry.

            Luckily for the author, the article says the fax number was handled by an old-school, real-life fax machine:

              It was Karen. She sounded breathless. She sounded like she was standing next to a machine that was hyperventilating. In the background, I could hear a rhythmic whir-chunk, whir-chunk.
            
              "Yes?" I answered, my voice the picture of innocent helpfulness.
            
              "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."

            • TeMPOraL

              yesterday at 10:34 AM

              Yup.

              Myself, I only saw one fax machine in actual operation in my life, some 15 years ago in a large government physics lab in United Kingdom. That machine sat on a desk near me, and would absolutely print anything and everything that would be sent to it.

              Since we were a small internal software team in a big physics lab (vs. front-line customer service), it wasn't used much - I only ever saw it print automobile ads, at the rate about one per day.

            • catapart

              yesterday at 12:31 PM

              > Luckily for the author, the article says[...]

              >the giveaway was having the karen call back to request the person stop.[emphasis added]

              if you believe that a government employee called this person back - especially in a full panic, right next to the alleged machine - I've got a bridge to sell you. I mean, yikes.

              "Sir, please." - yeah; total defeat. this low-level government employee was in such a desperate place that they had to call the only person who could fix it and helplessly beg him to stop. the machine was simultaneously out of toner, but still trying to chug on with the print, making mechanical noises of helplessness? tl;dr - everybody clapped.

          • johnnyanmac

            last Friday at 3:59 PM

            >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.

            • TeMPOraL

              yesterday at 10:47 AM

              Mentioned it in another comment, but I used to intern at a large physics facility in the UK some 15 years ago, and we had one of such old fax machines on a desk next to mine.

              I only ever saw it print some automobile-related ads, about one-two per day, so I'm pretty sure if someone did the thing described in the story to our number, it would absolutely keep printing until the upstream aborted. I also know the whole floor section would be disturbed, and we wouldn't know what to do other than to unplug the machine and file a ticket with IT.

              Now, fortunately, that fax machine was not a part of anyone's daily work there. In the situation/story described in the article, however, the fax machine is a critical dependency and disabling it like this pretty much shuts down part of the office. It really only ruins the day of individual employees, and possibly ruins the lives of fellow disabled. To the extent the government will care, they will chase the author/protagonist for misdemeanor, as they should.

            • catapart

              last Friday at 4:17 PM

              possibly! but I'd put some actual money on it. when I was doing student loan collections for incarcerated (or assumed incarcerated) people, we had to deal with a ton of city and state offices to track down whether or not we needed to pause collections. there are plenty of software vendors offering services, but you tend to hear the same four or five from most places and the places that don't use them would usually reference them like "ours is like westfax" or whatever.

              I'm not so naive as to think there's no podunk, crossroads "town" out there that has some mayberry-ass fax machine just spitting out whatever you send it. But given how attractive government offices are to people for either pranking or ...ahem redressing via their fax machines since the late 70's, it's more common than you might believe for even the smallest little townships to have a contract with a company that turns faxes into emails.

        • Etherlord87

          last Friday at 2:50 PM

          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.

          • TeMPOraL

            last Friday at 2:54 PM

            More likely they'd just cancel the benefits.

            • p_l

              last Friday at 4:28 PM

              The process described is literally an attempt at canceling benefits in "frog boiling" method. If Tories went straight to canceling benefits, they would end up in trouble, by making worst possible process they could put it in terms of "verifying eligibility and that benefit funds are not scammed out".

              Similar approaches are utilized in other areas of british government, unfortunately.

              • TeMPOraL

                yesterday at 11:20 AM

                We seem to have the same in Poland, given that I occasionally hear about people being upset they have to re-prove to ZUS or NFZ they have a missing limb or other such (still) permanent disability.

                > Similar approaches are utilized in other areas of british government, unfortunately.

                Look, I'm as cynical as they get, but where you see an attempt at "boiling the frog", and the author sees a personal insult, I see a simple security/anti-fraud measure. They're doing it for the same reason your bank logs you out after some 20+ minutes even if you're active, why most sites have you reauthenticate withing days to months, why your certificates expire after a year, or why you may rotate your access/API keys frequently. This prevents an erroneous (or fraudlent) state from living forever.

                I'm usually the security hater around these parts, never thought I'd have to defend these ideas. But the truth is: you don't have a process like this in place, you'll eventually discover double-digit percent of the money is going towards people with fake disabilities, registered once 40 years ago in bumfuck nowhere, and never verified since.

                FWIW, I do agree such process can be weaponized against people in general or some groups specifically, and I'm also not saying the process described in TFA is perfect. I am saying that the process was not a problem in this story. This is a story with a protagonist that's an asshole who abuses technology to hurt innocent people.

                • defrost

                  yesterday at 11:31 AM

                  There's a middle ground between once, 40 years ago, never again, and once every year.

                  There's a show The Last Leg that talks about the UK procedures along with many other disability issues and hurdles.

                  Missing limbs don't grow back, Cerebral Palsy is incurable, and so on ... yet year in year out people are facing disruptions and re-checks for the 15th or 16th time now they're 28 .. and on it goes.

                  How much waste and needless aggro comes about from annual checks, how hard is it to follow through once every five years or even ten on conditions that have been confirmed three or four times already.

                  > you'll eventually discover double-digit percent of the money is going towards people with fake disabilities,

                  Yeah ... along with double digit election fraud and other fervid fantasies.

                • p_l

                  yesterday at 9:59 PM

                  The reason I'm seeing "boiling the frog" is that tories did bunch of reforms, and were literally caught red handed with stuff like ordering a software vendor ensure the software would mistakenly bar people from getting services they are entitled for.

                  Our ZUS is broken because someone let basic anti-fraud checks go out of hand without review, Tories got caught literally redesigning entire benefit system with goal of slowly dismantling it (curiously after their redistricting of NHS the system suffered massive loss in efficiency and capability)

            • johnnyanmac

              last Friday at 4:00 PM

              That politician would cancel their re-election. Assuming it gets that far. Even this federal administration can't handle the pushback of straining benefits. A local government stands zero chance with such a maneuver.

              • TeMPOraL

                yesterday at 11:23 AM

                If everyone does that, per the commenter's question, then there will be no re-election, as at that point the country is on the brink of civil war.

          • mothballed

            last Friday at 2:54 PM

            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.

            • watwut

              last Friday at 3:50 PM

              Yes, the republican dominated congress will allocate more money for these, because some social service manager is screeching over pdfs. Really?

        • johnnyanmac

          last Friday at 3:56 PM

          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.

          • TeMPOraL

            last Friday at 5:29 PM

            Per the story, the protagonist DoSed the fax machine. Fax machines are dumb, and employees often don't know how to operate them outside of the most common flow.

            • johnnyanmac

              last Friday at 6:39 PM

              Yes. But I understand that you don't literally need to print every fax request immediately, right?

              That's the dumbest part of this situation. This sounds like an 80 movies trope, but here we are decades later.

              • TeMPOraL

                yesterday at 9:50 PM

                The only fax machine I saw at a place I worked did automatically print whatever was sent to it.

  • cm11

    last Friday at 4:54 PM

    This isn't a happy counterargument or anything, but (bad as it is) this is this person's job. Or rather it is the job. Their employer has customer service in order for it to buffer—in a cost efficient way—the one or many layers of people above this person from their (profitable) bad policies. It's a punching bag. And it's that because bad policy + punching bag is more profitable than good policy. It might even be the business/market. If the frustrating call leads to 50% of callers giving up (or not calling at all) and just paying something they might not owe, that's a nice net ROI. You might build a business around that, one that wouldn’t have the margins otherwise. You get the callers caving because they feel bad yelling at the unfortunate employees, meanwhile it's in the company's formal protocol to only correct it (or escalate the ticket to someone who could) after the customer has yelled long enough.

    There are bad customers for sure, but we also cheat good customers out of what they’re owed until they’re “bad.” The customer can yell or eat the cost. I think I can both feel bad for the employee and not place much blame on the customer given customer service as a quasi profit center.

  • cess11

    last Friday at 3:33 PM

    Right, shouldn't make her workday stressful, she's just following orders.

    • johnnyanmac

      last Friday at 3:49 PM

      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.

      • cess11

        yesterday at 7:27 AM

        Many people go into public service with an attitude of 'I want to help people'.

        The catch is that unless it's some form of care or perhaps fire-fighting, there's a high risk that it'll be pretty nasty stuff. Things like denying people decency, perhaps even life, because they were slow to respond or for once didn't get help filling out some form or whatever. Throwing suffering, poor people out on the streets, and then someone else employed by the state hound them until they're almost invisible.

        HR people usually say the same and realise too late that they're not going to be as appreciated as they'd hoped, at least not by the people they initially thought they'd help out.

        • johnnyanmac

          yesterday at 7:46 AM

          I'm sure some do. But the federal government is the biggest employer. I see that as inevitably doing a job because its a job.

          I'm not saying to be perfect on the job or anything. I'm sure like most jobs it grinds on you. But I've never seen a situation where taking it out (passively or actively) on the customer directly has ever ended well. And there's many, many times where I wanted to actively do so.

  • mrexcess

    last Friday at 4:30 PM

    >Like, does this guy think this single woman is responsible for the kafka-esque trap they're both in?

    If there's any class of individual in whom I'm willing to place greater than average trust in their ability to read vocal tones, it's probably blind people. Just sayin'.

• FatherOfCurses

  last Friday at 3:23 PM

  A few thoughts about the world this situation exists in:

  1. Whenever I am dealing with a problem, I always try to say to the person helping me "I know you are not the person responsible for my issue." My goal is to help them not feel that my frustration is directed at them.

  2. Government is a special area, especially when it comes to benefits, because a lot of regulations are in place because some random politician got a law passed/amended in order to convince their constituents they were fighting fraud and laziness. This is quite often done with no thought to the downstream effects.

  3. I consider myself to be an empathetic person, but there have been times in my life when I have had to work in a job that was very anti-customer. Because doing nice things for customers was punished, I fell into a pattern of finding ways to not do nice things for customers and actually got some enjoyment out of the logical puzzle of denying them. I'm not defending it by any means and I'm quite regretful about it, but I can understand how someone can fall into that mentality.

  4. I believe the real failure here, like so many other things, is the system design. The disability benefits system in the author's case seems to be providing benefits to permanently disabled and temporarily disabled people. The review process should be differentiating between these two groups. As the author points out, they are never not going to be blind.

  I think a better way to communicate the frustration would have been finding the fax number for the minister responsible for the government department and faxing THEM the documentation, as they have the power to change things.

  • niuzeta

    yesterday at 4:55 PM

    > I always try to say to the person helping me "I know you are not the person responsible for my issue."

    This simple sentence that shows empathy to the person on the other side of the line is so profound. In a single breath you let the other person be heard, be seen, and appreciated. At the worst, it makes you stand out amongst all the abusive asshats they interact with day to day. It makes them want to help you. I've used this line every time I had to deal with a customer service agent and the voice always softened after that. A simple "thank you", or "take your time" seem to mark you as a person, rather than a case to close.

• charles_f

  last Friday at 3:51 PM

  While I do agree generally, there are a couple things to note

  1. Author was made to pay for the bureaucracy and a rigid rule, and found a way to revert that. Now Karen pays the price for the bureaucracy. In the end Author made it a 0 sum game while there was not necessarily a need... and yet fair is fair, he was entered in the game without asking, and he played it.

  2. > She has no power, absolutely no power

  I doubt if this is true. In the end she said "fine we'll mark the file as updated" while having received only partially what Author sent. This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.

  In the end I'm not sure if it was worth making someone else suffer, there was probably that 2 pages file that they needed to send, which would have been enough to send everyone on their merry way. Beyond just creating suffering to someone else, that could have very well ended with "fine, we'll review those 500 pages, I'm not sure if we can do that by the deadline".

  • thomascountz

    last Friday at 4:05 PM

       This shows she had permissions to change the status of their file, and agency in determining if she should.
    

    Concluding she had permission and agency suggests she had intrinsic motivation to not apply that agency. If we assume the motivation is nefarious, then the main character is the victim. However, quite more likely, she is also a victim of the system, whereby were she to apply her discretionary agency to reduce the burden on the main character, she takes on an equal or greater burden herself. Once the burden had already shifted onto her, she accepted that she doesn't have any options to prevent it.

• justonceokay

  last Friday at 2:06 PM

  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

• SomaticPirate

  last Friday at 2:29 PM

  My exact thoughts. Too often we lash out at the person who is working within a Kafkaesque system as a lowly bureaucrat. Attack the system. Find the fax number for the chief of your social security administration. Get a letter sending group together. The democratic system is slow and terrible but atleast the author seems to live in one.

  There should be a political call to action here. Call xyz or work to change this law. Bureaucrats run on laws. Laws can be changed. I was able to get my local HOA to accept pdf uploads just be talking with them. Small example but change is possible. Not as fun as ruining someones day though

  • pjc50

    last Friday at 3:24 PM

    > There should be a political call to action here

    A real problem in both benefits claiming and immigration systems is that there are voters on the other side loudly demanding that the system be made more hostile and kafkaesque.

    • ryandrake

      last Friday at 3:47 PM

      Yea, it's a mistake to think everyone wants things to be better, and that we just need to organize. There is a huge, motivated voting block out there who want to make things worse, at least worse for people unlike themselves, and they are organized and fighting back (and usually winning).

    • egorfine

      last Friday at 6:35 PM

      And bear in mind that there are quite a few politicians willing to monetize that by actually implementing those more hostile and kafkaesque rules.

• raincole

  last Friday at 2:51 PM

  > 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.

  • yesterday at 11:15 AM

  • pjc50

    last Friday at 3:22 PM

    Really? Are you sure?

    The UK disability system is notorious for compliance hurdles. Quite a lot of people including relatives of mine have had claims denied by the bureaucracy, applied for review (which is done by an external judge), and had it reinstated.

    It was even worse when the system was outsourced to ATOS.

    I've also heard stories about the Norwegian NAV. I don't think this is confined to any one country.

    It's not hard to understand. There's constant political budget pressure, and narratives about "scoungers". So the system gets set to default-deny and told to limit the cost of claims by any means necessary.

    • raincole

      last Friday at 3:30 PM

      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.

      • philipwhiuk

        last Friday at 4:05 PM

        They're motivated financially to do so. There's bonuses.

        • cdcarter

          last Friday at 5:55 PM

          That is what raincole is asking about. Do you have a source for this, in the Uk context?

        • squigz

          yesterday at 2:17 AM

          Government employees get bonuses for denying people benefits they're entitled to?

          Source, please?

    • qingcharles

      last Friday at 3:58 PM

      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.

  • James_K

    last Friday at 3:30 PM

    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).

  • mothballed

    last Friday at 3:15 PM

    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.

  • crooked-v

    last Friday at 4:18 PM

    Mere disability re-verification is pretty minor when it comes to bureaucratic insanity. For comparison, in the UK, in recent memory almost a thousand postal service contractors were wrongly convicted of crimes based entirely on a broken government accounting system that constantly got tbe numbers wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).

• chaseadam17

  last Friday at 3:39 PM

  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.

• stuaxo

  last Friday at 2:43 PM

  It's her inconvenience vs money he relies on to live.

  The squeaky wheel gets the grease and this is the sort of thing that might make Karen suggest to her boss that they accept PDF files.

  • jotux

    last Friday at 2:55 PM

    >might make Karen suggest to her boss that they accept PDF files.

    I'm not sure what state or country this was written in, but requiring physical copies or a fax is very likely a legal requirement.

    • WJW

      last Friday at 3:11 PM

      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.

• master-lincoln

  last Friday at 3:00 PM

  What makes you think this is about her? It makes no difference in her job (I assume) if things go smoothly or not. It needs to hurt the operational procedures so it reaches people in power to change the rules to be meaningful. What makes a fax more secure than an email?

  Also how could she just decide that the disability status is accepted without checking the documents. That is just fraud...

  • recursivedoubts

    last Friday at 6:16 PM

    man

• madethemcry

  last Friday at 2:54 PM

  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/

• renewiltord

  last Friday at 2:10 PM

  The lesson is obviously to have an ablative layer of suffering people strapped to the front of your organization. No one can fight you without hurting them so you are invincible.

  It’s commonly practiced and we can see why.

  • cucumber3732842

    last Friday at 3:08 PM

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

• robofanatic

  last Friday at 4:23 PM

  But hopefully erratic behavior of such callers may actually bring some change because Karen is definitely going to complain about him once the manager asks why the fax machine is down.

• jollyllama

  last Friday at 3:21 PM

  We don't have to assume there is a good guy in the story. The resulting piece that the author made, due to the vitriolic tone, is not qualitatively different than a troll post designed to paint the disabled as stunted and bitter.

  Nevertheless, assuming it's true, the author did expose the lie of Karen or rather the system. It wasn't the real evidence that changed her mind, according to her comments, it was the punitive arm-twisting applied to them by the DoS of the fax machine.

  • recursivedoubts

    last Friday at 6:15 PM

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

• tliltocatl

  last Friday at 4:38 PM

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

• laszlojamf

  last Friday at 4:24 PM

  to be fair, if the author is truthful in his description of this Karen it sounds more like somebody who uses whatever leverage they have to make other people miserable. Did you see Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? Those people exist in real life too.

• stavros

  last Friday at 2:01 PM

  It is more important that actually disabled people can easily collect assistance than that we catch fraudsters, though I suspect the US, as a culture, has a different opinion.

  • RobotToaster

    last Friday at 2:56 PM

    "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.

• stackghost

  last Friday at 4:14 PM

  I'm with you that TFA comes off as mean spirited and needlessly so.

  But having worked in large orgs in highly regulated and bureaucratic sectors (aerospace), sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly.

  Policy like "we can't accept email for security purposes" comes from total fucking morons in sub-C level upper management who have no insight into how the business actually works, for whom it's easier to say "no" than it is to say "yes".

  It's entirely plausible that this episode (which I bet blew through a lot of PPNS budget in toner) caused some mid level manager to report the process breakage, kicking off a review of whether they really need fax.

  • egorfine

    last Friday at 6:47 PM

    > sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly.

    This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.

• z3c0

  last Friday at 3:57 PM

  It seems Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil" has culturally diminished over time. The sentiment you're pushing is the very basis for Sergeant Shultz's character in Hogan's Heroes[1]. It also doesn't change the lack of any route towards a higher-up, so the tired "they're just an employee" defense really doesn't matter when, for all intents and purposes, that employee is the only way for the author to interact with the bureaucracy they're (very obviously) being ushered through with zero concern for the high-stakes outcome.

  In short, the answer to complacency isn't "more complacency".

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banner

• James_K

  last Friday at 3:33 PM

  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.

• cucumber3732842

  last Friday at 2:09 PM

  "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.

  • Permit

    last Friday at 2:25 PM

    > because they create an instant exploit where the machine can be as bad as it wants as long as it hides behind the cogs.

    The exploit is already there whether or not you blame the cogs. Did blaming the cogs in this instance solve anything? Are disability benefits reformed in any way?

    • rogerrogerr

      last Friday at 2:40 PM

      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.

      • mattkrause

        last Friday at 3:44 PM

        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.

        • cucumber3732842

          yesterday at 11:27 AM

          >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

          That's almost worse because what it creates is a system that abuses everyone by default and only when someone cries to their politician does it shape up.

          • mattkrause

            yesterday at 1:54 PM

            I guess this depends on whether you think the system was deliberately designed to be “abusive” or has evolved some blind spots/legacy issues.

            In this case, I’d guess “fax in your documents” was, long ago, meant to be an improvement over having to mail them in. It wasn’t chosen to be intentionally inconvenient. The system—or perhaps the laws it operates under—could certainly be modernized and your rep is well-positioned to nudge that along.

            Likewise, I doubt the rudeness was a matter of policy. At a business, you’d ask to speak with the manager. Here, YOU via your rep are the manager and this is how you get your say.

        • last Friday at 3:44 PM

      • cucumber3732842

        last Friday at 3:10 PM

        > _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.

        • guzfip

          last Friday at 3:46 PM

          > 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.

  • aerodexis

    last Friday at 2:22 PM

    and likewise, "hate the cogs" takes are equally worthless. All nuance is lost, the cycle repeats again.

  • tehwebguy

    last Friday at 2:44 PM

    Yeah and wayyy more importantly cops don't get fired for not escalating and killing a guy!

  • afro88

    last Friday at 2:28 PM

    What good does hating the cogs do though? Make noise to the people who can change the machine.

    • 63stack

      last Friday at 2:42 PM

      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.

    • pclmulqdq

      last Friday at 3:02 PM

      When you hate the machine as a whole, the cogs are also in scope.

    • foxglacier

      last Friday at 2:40 PM

      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.

      • afro88

        yesterday at 12:29 AM

        > The cogs are part of the machine, they don't deserve any sympathy just because they chose to do bad things for money

        That's a bit of a stretch saying that someone who enforces the rules around disability for a job is doing bad things for money. These same rules filter out a lot of scammers that if not stoped would mean less money going to the right people.

        It's also a low skill low pay job, probably worked by a large percentage of people who are close to the poverty line and just trying to make ends meet to support a family.

    • stavros

      last Friday at 4:15 PM

      It increases costs for the machine, and eventually it realizes that cogs are cheaper when they're not getting yelled at all day.

    • mothballed

      last Friday at 2:37 PM

      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.

  • cindyllm

    last Friday at 2:11 PM

    [dead]

• voidUpdate

  last Friday at 2:13 PM

  > "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."

  • bmicraft

    last Friday at 2:41 PM

    The author may feel like this is true, but she probably probably doesn't care for the Kafkaesque nature of the system and doesn't stand to profit from their misery either.

  • niuzeta

    yesterday at 4:48 PM

    Seems like a lot of non-instantiated claims. It's easy to mark a faceless bureaucrat that we are allowed to hate and project out frustration onto it. It's a good writing trope that works, because it's so easy to relate.

    The OP's point was that the "faceless" bureaucrat may be helpless and the smug emotion the original author implied may not be unfounded. I can see a valid point for both.

  • iso1631

    last Friday at 2:33 PM

    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.

    • voidUpdate

      last Friday at 2:39 PM

      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

  • last Friday at 2:18 PM

• mmcwilliams

  last Friday at 3:04 PM

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

  • phyzome

    last Friday at 3:14 PM

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

  • recursivedoubts

    last Friday at 6:16 PM

    read it again

• lenkite

  last Friday at 2:52 PM

  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.

• fainpul

  last Friday at 1:56 PM

  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.

  • spicyusername

    last Friday at 2:08 PM

        never blame anyone for anything
    

    That's actually not quite true.

    Assigning blame, via agency or otherwise, and the associated social or legal consequences are additional signals in the environment that influence and change behavior.

    If the actions of an individual were involved in propagating some chain of events, then it's perfectly valid to respond to their involvement, via social stigma, punishment, etc, regardless of whether or not there is "agency". The knowledge and anticipation of a similar response changes future actor's behavior, with or without free will.

    This discussion itself is exactly an example of this in practice. If there's no such thing as agency, then us talking about what someone should or shouldn't do, given whether there is free will, have any influence on anything, except that it does because interacting with these ideas themselves change behavior, with or without free will.

    This is what people mean when they say we should just ignore the question of free will entirely, because it doesn't really factor into how we should design the social contract.

    • fainpul

      last Friday at 2:22 PM

      I agree with you, except for the blame part.

      Of course people act accordingly to the system they're in. If they expect punishment for an action, or not, changes their behaviour. By defining what's punishable, we can change the course of action. But if you look at any action which already happened, you can't blame anyone for it, because it had to happen that way, given the circumstances.

      • foxglacier

        last Friday at 2:51 PM

        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.

  • ramon156

    last Friday at 2:03 PM

    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.

    • renewiltord

      last Friday at 2:15 PM

      > 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.

      • WarmWash

        last Friday at 3:03 PM

        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?

    • lotsofpulp

      last Friday at 2:08 PM

      > 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.

    • s5300

      last Friday at 2:06 PM

      [dead]

  • justonceokay

    last Friday at 2:08 PM

    If you think there’s no free will then you won’t argue with me when I say I think there is.

    • pavel_lishin

      last Friday at 2:12 PM

      But they will argue with you, for it was predestined.

      • scrollop

        last Friday at 2:52 PM

        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.

  • recursivedoubts

    last Friday at 1:59 PM

    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?

    • forshaper

      last Friday at 2:07 PM

      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.

    • fainpul

      last Friday at 2:04 PM

      right

Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules.

Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.

• Synthetic7346

  last Friday at 3:25 PM

  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

  • password4321

    last Friday at 3:41 PM

    > What's the attack surface of an email vs fax?

    I believe the primary concern has been while the message is in transit, unencrypted routing over the internet vs. unencrypted over the phone line.

    • adzm

      last Friday at 3:54 PM

      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.

  • kstrauser

    last Friday at 4:08 PM

    It's a current requirement. (Source: I'm adjacent to a doctor's office.) Two big advantages of faxes are that 1) they're point-to-point, and 2) there's zero caching between the sender and receiver.

    If everyone had a fax machine such that you'd commonly get a working fax receiver if you mis-entered the recipient's number, then #1 wouldn't be such a big deal. But in reality, if you enter a fax number, and the other end actually answers and responds with a screech, it's extremely likely that you're connected to the right party. (Also, I bet 99% of modern faxing is triggered by a nearby computer, or by pressing one of the preprogrammed speed dial buttons on the fax. There aren't that many opportunities to misdial the number in the first place.)

    That second is also a big deal. There are no intermediate servers which may be caching and inappropriately storing the data, except maybe the NSA, but what can ya do. The sender may have a cache, in the form of a print spooler. The receiver may have a cache where it temporarily stores inbound faxes and prints them asynchronously. But since both of those devices are owned and controlled by the parties in the communication, that's not a legal issue.

    I'm not advocating for faxes. They're a slow, clunky, lossy, pain in the ass. And yet, they do have specific properties that are pretty sweet. I guess the equivalent would be if I could ask you to send a PDF to my specific IPv6 address, and you could peer-to-peer shoot it directly to me. If I typoed the address at all, it's statistically "unlikely" that another person would be listening on that specific IP a that specific time. And if it were truly P2P, then you and I would be the only 2 who ever touched the file, except maybe the NSA, but what can ya do. Alas, I don't see that replacing fax machines any time soon.

    • yonatan8070

      last Friday at 5:17 PM

      > I guess the equivalent would be if I could ask you to send a PDF to my specific IPv6 address, and you could peer-to-peer shoot it directly to me.

      That's not exactly complicated if either party owns a web server. Which - last I checked - the government has.

      Just give the person who needs to send the sensitive documents a short link like uploaddocuments.gov, have that page ask for some basic identifying info, and have a box for the user to drag and drop a file. At which point the browser will p2p upload that file over HTTPS.

      • kstrauser

        last Friday at 5:28 PM

        That’s kinda true, but adds a few steps over cmd-P “print to fax”, paste in a phone number, done. And when done, the fax workflow has been tested and approved in courts. It’s a known entity.

        I don’t love faxes. This isn’t me saying we should keep them forever. We shouldn’t. Still, there are reasons they’re still widely used for medical stuff today. If CMS or HHS rolled out a new method and told doctor’s offices to start using it if they want to get paid, the industry would switch in a heartbeat. Short of that, any other alternative will take approximately forever.

        • apical_dendrite

          last Friday at 5:47 PM

          We still deal with doctors who handwrite their progress notes. Fax will be around for a very, very long time.

          • kstrauser

            last Friday at 6:09 PM

            Well, that too.

    • bigbuppo

      last Friday at 5:28 PM

      That's a very 1993 understanding of telecommunications.

      • kstrauser

        last Friday at 6:11 PM

        Possibly! I haven’t used my Verizon CO badge to work on telco equipment in a few years. How is it fundamentally different now so that my brief description is wrong? I like to learn new stuff!

    • UltraSane

      last Friday at 5:32 PM

      Most faxes today are between two fax over the Internet services and so are completely pointless.

      • apical_dendrite

        last Friday at 5:46 PM

        Amazingly enough, this is actually not true. Many smaller doctors' offices still have a physical fax machine. I work on automation for certain processes in healthcare and a very large proportion of the faxes we receive come from physical fax machines. You can see artifacts on the fax itself and sometimes the cover letter will have a scribbled note.

        • UltraSane

          last Friday at 10:09 PM

          Do they still have POTS lines? Telecom companies are shutting down old SS7 switches so eventually all faxes are ultimately being sent over the Internet and it will be entirely vestigial.

          • kstrauser

            last Friday at 10:28 PM

            The offices I know of do. We have a PBX, and a "bare" POTS line for the fax.

• fluidcruft

  last Friday at 5:18 PM

  It's also funny because at work our fax machines don't print unless we go over and print it. The machine just converts the fax to PDF.

  This is an indictment of email more than anything.

• tzs

  last Friday at 8:03 PM

  > Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no.

  Doesn’t that only apply to covered entities, which the internet is telling me does not include the Social Security Administration.

  • xk3

    yesterday at 8:34 PM

    And it also doesn't really apply here... If YOU the individual (who owns your own medical records) agree that the transmission method is safe then HIPAA doesn't apply. HIPAA applies when the OTHER party sends it:

    This is called "Individual Right of Access". If you ask a doctor to email your records to your personal Gmail, the doctor must comply. However, they are required to briefly warn you that email is unencrypted and insecure. Once you say, "I understand the risk, send it anyway," the doctor is no longer liable for any breach that happens during transmission.

• z3c0

  last Friday at 10:11 PM

  The habitual espousal of protocol in place of humanistic discretion is the problem the author was trying to call out, and that you're actively partaking in.

  Fun fact, traditionally, police officers are called upon to use their discretion over blind enforcement. The mechanized enforcement of law, historically, has never done any favors for society.

• yieldcrv

  last Friday at 6:17 PM

  Reminds me of a typical conservation with my bank

  “Hello sir, before we get started, for security measures, please provide this information about your account”

  Hmm I dont have this on hand, let me log in to my account and look at the settings and read it verbatim back to you, proving I’m not compromising this user at all

  “Thank you, sir!”

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”

• shepherdjerred

  last Friday at 7:58 PM

  It's the classic "and everyone clapped" story.

  I get that this is exhausting, but the rank-and-file employee is just doing their job. This is like people attacking McDonalds employees because they were out of Szechuan Sauce [0].

  The author _clearly_ had a way to accomplish their goal. Why could they not just say "ok that's inconvenient, but I'll just use this online service to send my existing PDF".

  [0]: https://www.nme.com/features/tv-features/rick-and-mortys-sze...

• panzagl

  last Friday at 3:22 PM

  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.

• gcmeplz

  last Friday at 4:03 PM

  Non-consumer printers are also pretty good! I used to teach 120 students, so printing out materials for all of them for a week would sometimes be 1,000+ pages. 500 pages? I can't picture that causing problems for any org that needed to print things regularly.

  And toner? I'd wager that the printer is going to use a print drum. That does have toner inside, but you'd talk about replacing the drum–not running out of toner.

  Even consumer drum printers are pretty good nowadays. I have a Brother drum printer, and I wouldn't worry about sending a 500 page job to it if I needed to.

  https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/183926/...

• mrguyorama

  last Friday at 5:33 PM

  It's very likely, even in some smaller local governments, that the "Fax" doesn't do any printing at all. Digital faxing has been a staple of bureaucracy for decades.

  So it doesn't inconvenience the "Karen" who is supposedly so evil for (checks notes) following the laws or rules that were implemented by people who were voted into their position.

  Unlike in the private sector, public sector employees are often literally constrained by the law. You can personally end up in court if you try to help someone bypass a law. Plenty of government employees DO still end up bending rules.

  Karen has zero power. If she did, she wouldn't be talking to assholes on the phone all day every day.

> 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.

• RobotToaster

  last Friday at 3:01 PM

  > 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.

  • maweaver

    last Friday at 4:26 PM

    Relevant to this story, laser eye surgery was developed in the late 80s/early 90s and can improve sight to the level that some who were legally blind no longer are.

    • DrammBA

      last Friday at 5:25 PM

      > Relevant to this story

      Is it? The Author mentions he has degenerated optical nerves from birth, I don't think laser fixes that.

      • kakacik

        last Friday at 7:34 PM

        Yeah, but don't expect this level of fine granularity from government, any government, thats ridiculous expectations. Heck, I wouldn't expect it neither from any private company as a default state.

        • DrammBA

          yesterday at 1:39 AM

          I wouldn't expect it from any goverment either, but I would expect it from someone who allegedly read the story and is trying to share relevant information.

  • jaggederest

    last Friday at 3:38 PM

    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.

    • michaelkeenan

      last Friday at 6:00 PM

      Great list!

      There's also Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that now has a (very expensive) gene therapy: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-10-12/fda-panel-endorses-gene...

• lbarrow

  last Friday at 3:40 PM

  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.

  • handoflixue

    yesterday at 1:39 AM

    The concept behind the process might be fine.

    The demand that poor blind people acquire and submit records through an obscure technology, at their own personal expenses, on short deadline, is obviously absurd.

    In particular, the requirement to re-prove basic facts suggests a fundamentally hostile design - you could just ask them to send a simple email asserting that yes, they are still disabled; or have them check a box and return a form.

    Is there's truly an epidemic of people staying on welfare after their lifelong disability was cured?

    • adammarples

      yesterday at 2:16 AM

      Who else is supposed to aquire and submit the records? If I'm getting free money for five years and all that's required is a fax every five years, I wouldn't consider that particularly burdensome. I have to fill in a timesheet every week.

      • gravypod

        yesterday at 5:07 AM

        Maybe a better way to accomplish this is a free yearly physical with a doctor? The doctor can then be required to share any changes in disability with the government. Missing x years of appointments also stops your benefits. If you can't come to the doctor maybe they could do a house call?

• last Friday at 9:13 PM

• BoppreH

  last Friday at 2:48 PM

  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 cannot get over the malice seeping through this author's writing. Happiness does not come from making others miserable.

• phyzome

  last Friday at 3:17 PM

  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.

  • newer_vienna

    last Friday at 3:27 PM

    Regardless of the condition of your life, harboring anger and malice never leads to fulfilment.

    • kevinh

      last Friday at 3:58 PM

      Sure, and if depressed people weren't sad, they'd be happier. 'Just don't get frustrated' isn't actionable advice.

      • newer_vienna

        last Friday at 4:40 PM

        That's not what I said. To feel an emotion is morally neutral, while to use your emotions to cause harm is wrong.

        • johnnyanmac

          yesterday at 7:51 AM

          And where's the reaction of Karen using her apathy to harm someone who just wants to get their benefits and not go homeless? Apathy is an emotjon as well.

          • crazygringo

            yesterday at 1:37 PM

            "Karen" is following procedure. She didn't create it. She's not choosing to harm anyone. The "no email" policy is not hers personally. She's entirely innocent here.

      • kakacik

        last Friday at 8:16 PM

        > 'Just don't get frustrated'

        That's not the issue, not sure why you try to steer discussion that way. The issue is, that's not enough to be an asshole and have some respect or general approval for that.

        Every Karen making hell for entire neighborhood has some sad story behind, usually series of them and some are properly fucking horrible and heartbreaking to levels where this article reads like great easy chill life. I wish I was kidding, wife is GP and has to do basic psychiatric work too due to lack of available specialist doctors and the stories she hears almost daily... For example the amount of people who experienced sexual abuse as children with lifelong devastating consequences is fucking horribly high, but most go unreported even to close family so not part of any stats.

        To condense - this is not enough as an excuse, however harsh the life can be. Thus don't expect that much sympathies. I'd expect a bit higher empathy levels from folks here.

    • dymk

      last Friday at 6:19 PM

      Easy to say that when you're not the blind person having their disability benefits threatened periodically

  • squigz

    last Friday at 3:38 PM

    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.)

• crazygringo

  last Friday at 4:39 PM

  Seriously.

  The tone is so "I'm smarter than everyone else and I'm dealing with idiots", and it's just incredibly immature.

  > to prove that I—a man who has been blind since birth—am, in fact, still blind

  Plenty of disabilities can be temporary. And rather than argue about which are permanent and which are temporary and where to draw the line, it's entirely reasonable to ask everyone to just resubmit documentation every 5-7 years.

  The author is writing as if "Karen" was coming up with these policies herself, and is choosing to spite her personally. It's incredibly sad. Karen is presumably just a poor woman doing her best to do her job within a system she can't change either. She can't personally make an exception to allow documentation by e-mail. So why on earth would you take all of this out on her?

  It's just really sad that this person thinks they're somehow "winning" or "getting back" at the system. They're not helping anything, just spreading misery. Maybe some people read this and think it's a great revenge story or something -- I read it and I just feel pity for the author that they think there's anything good about the way they acted.

  I mean, why not take a minute to think about the 30 other people who needed to fax in documentation that day and couldn't, because this one person wanted to jam the machine and use up all its toner. What if the author's sabotage was responsible for other people missing their benefits?

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.

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.

• theseanz

  last Friday at 3:12 PM

  I have no eyes and I must take a vision test to prove I'm blind.

  • ThinkingGuy

    last Friday at 9:56 PM

    I would hope that "any physician taking one look at you in the waiting room" would be a sufficient test.

  • mlmonkey

    last Friday at 3:31 PM

    "Cover your left eye .... look straight at that chart and tell me what the third line from the bottom says ..."

• actionfromafar

  last Friday at 1:42 PM

  Regulatory capture.

I'm blind. This guy is not fighting the system. He's being a jerk to a call center worker and writing fan fiction about her suffering in public. Not a good look.

• cobertos

  last Friday at 6:52 PM

  How smooth are your experiences with the system? I've dealt with only one other government system like this and it was impenetrable, gave up after 6 months of calling, never receiving the benefit. I'm unsure how someone can experience a system that has no thought to their well-being and then _not_ find gratification in the small person winning.

• xattt

  last Friday at 5:22 PM

  Having worked in a similar field, providing historic documentation when it’s not necessary usually prolongs the process for the client. This is because the reviewer now has to sort through all these files to make sure new contradictory info isn’t lost in between.

  Also, large firms will typically digitize directly into a document management system. It would be no more than 5-15 minutes at most for an experienced reviewer to flip through 500 PDF pages to find current supporting evidence of a medical disability.

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.

• rgblambda

  last Friday at 9:38 PM

  Was thinking this too. She could have blocked that number on the (valid) basis that it was intentionally spamming them, and then stopped their benefits.

  • johnnyanmac

    yesterday at 7:54 AM

    Someone maliciously compliant enough to do this probably isn't someone you want to escalate with. Not with a reprimand, firing, or even lawsuit.

For anyone interested in how this can be changed, here’s an example from the Nordics.

In the early 2000s, the Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, started a journey from “tax police” to service. This was a radical change that affected every aspect and function of the bureaucracy. It went from far down the list to the second most trusted agency (after the Swedish Armed Forces) in 2023 [1].

As a citizen, the differences are notable. I came to Sweden after the change, and my previous experiences in other countries were very similar to the friction-filled endeavor implied by the author. The people I dealt with were similarly unhelpful, unconcerned, if not downright undermining my efforts to comply.

This is all a result of a system that breeds friction. Citizens and bureaucrats alike simply play their part. Moving to Sweden was an otherworldly experience. My first mistake, and resulting interaction with the agency, was met with compassion and understanding from a bureaucrat who then made an effort to help put things right. It’s hard to describe how radically different the situation felt. Anger, frustration, and helplessness were gone. Instead, I felt like sending flowers to Karin, the bureaucrat (I really should have). I’ve become a better citizen, more likely to comply going forward.

I wish more agencies around the world would take note, especially now, in a world trending toward fewer human interactions and increasing digitalization. Bureaucracies and technology alike should continue to be built to improve collective human experiences, not break us apart.

[1] https://chef.se/artiklar/skatteverkets-forandringsresa-nagra...

Apologies for the poor quality link, my morning Googling wasn't very effective.

I found this story very surprising in a number of ways, so I gave some of the details a quick search.

According to the docs linked, there are two forms at play, SSA-454 and SSA-455. The author likely had to have an SSA-455 filled, as his condition is of a "Medical Improvement Not Expected" type (this differentiation does exist). Seems that this needs to be done every 5-7 years.

Both can be filled online apparently though, self-service style (not sure how accessible that is for him though):

https://www.ssa.gov/disability/review

Faxing and physical mail to a specific office seem to be additional options. Doesn't even sound like the fax and mail rule is office specific, seems to be a Social Security Administration originating internal policy.

Am I missing something?

• elephanlemon

  last Friday at 4:26 PM

  The entire blog is probably generated by OpenClawd or the like. I don’t think it’s a real story.

  • cdcarter

    last Friday at 5:58 PM

    The blog started publishing in 2017. Why do you think this?

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

• scottlamb

  last Friday at 3:54 PM

  > I know it's fiction

  Or semi-fiction? The author is actually blind and tagged it nonfiction, but I suspect some embellishment.

  > but in reality, Karen is likely just as annoyed by this as the author.

  When I'm frustrated talking with an agent of a big organization, I try to remember they probably didn't set the policy. But I also expect them to express some empathy for how I'm negatively affected by that policy. The author/protagonist, accurately or not, felt the opposite from "Karen from compliance". In their shoes, I wouldn't feel much empathy for Karen in return.

  > The spam should go to the person in charge

  I also expect the agent to have a closer relationship with "the person in charge" than I do (none whatsoever). If I mention the policy is absurd, they could at least make some effort to pass that along to their manager.

  Also, sending the information to the agent is necessary compliance, even if the volume is malicious.

  > not the person who is forced to deal with this every day

  Maybe they feeling a bit of the pain themselves might make them more likely to speak up. If this becomes a miserable job that no one will stay in, that might provoke a change.

  • squigz

    last Friday at 4:15 PM

    > Maybe they feeling a bit of the pain themselves might make them more likely to speak up. If this becomes a miserable job that no one will stay in, that might provoke a change.

    Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good.

    • scottlamb

      last Friday at 4:51 PM

      > Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good.

      I don't think the author would have acted this way toward someone who said "sorry, I know it's a burden, I know it's stressful to be at risk of losing these benefits, and I've told that to everyone I can repeatedly." So how much danger is there really that the inconvenience of reloading the fax machine is pushing out someone who is trying to do good?

      (For the sake of argument, I'm going with all the details of the story, including that this caused Karen any distress at all. I think it's more likely a real office like this has a setup for which getting a 500-page fax is no big deal at all. And if it really is a DoS on their processing, the consequence I'd be more worried about is causing acceptance to slow down enough that other disability claims are not processed before their deadline.)

      • squigz

        last Friday at 5:04 PM

        > I don't think the author would have acted this way toward someone who said "sorry, I know it's a burden, I know it's stressful to be at risk of losing these benefits, and I've told that to everyone I can repeatedly." So how much danger is there really that the inconvenience of reloading the fax machine is pushing out someone who is trying to do good?

        It's not just the faxing that causes people to act the way Karen (supposedly) acted - it's the anger and maliciousness being directed at them by numerous people, all day, every day, even when they do try to be sympathetic to the fact that the system fucks everyone. But there's only so much empathy one can muster.

        (Not to mention the various other factors that push good people out of government, such as working for decades to make the systems better only for them to get worse.)

        To be clear, I agree with you to an extent; if instead of being malicious and directing anger at the people doing their best to help, people like the author more calmly expressed their frustration with the system, maybe they can bring it up with their superiors, as you said.

        All of it's a mess, and not a single facet of this issue is without blame - not the recipients, not the bureaucrats, not the politicians, and certainly not the voters.

        • scottlamb

          last Friday at 6:18 PM

          I hear you...to an extent. I just got off the phone with Comcast Business Class, asking for a refund after I had 26 hours of downtime in the past week. Not a company with a great reputation for customer service, and the agent I spoke with was probably not exactly earning a six-figure salary. He was empathetic. The outcome was unsatisfactory [1], but he was polite, he said he understood how important availability is my business, he put me on hold for a while, said he tried for more with his manager, and I believed him. That's all it takes, not like a master study in empathizing with your bitter enemy and de-escalating conflict. I'm mad at Comcast, but I'm not mad at him.

          [1] A discount that was less than the delta between consumer-class and business-class prices, when the latter doesn't seem to actually be providing better availability lately.

          • dqv

            yesterday at 6:38 AM

            I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

            Yes, some people thrive on talking to a lot of people. For everyone else, it can be exhausting. It's hard to navigate social differences talking to 15+ strangers every hour for 8 hours. Each person has a unique expectation about how to relate to them. It's hard knowing, for example, who wants to be interrupted and who doesn't [0]. Some people talk in vagueries with exposition, making it hard to understand what it is they want, but feel they have communicated clearly, so get upset at being asked questions. I could go on and on about this. The end result is an absolutely JUICED frontal lobe, though. "Why don't you find another job" is a common question to people and I don't think people with a juiced frontal lobe have the capability to reason their way into getting their resume and applying to new jobs. To remember that comment would be to remember 25 calls ago that someone told you to find a new job.

            > He was empathetic.

            I don't understand what this means when people say it. Empathetic means having empathy for someone, which means imagining being in their situation, and feeling the feeling associated with that situation. That takes a long time for me, like a few minutes, uninterrupted, at least. So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy, that's just saying words that sound like empathy. And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them (because how are you supposed to feel frustrated without being frustrated?) so as not to make the customer upset.

            Customers hate to hear (in a sort of "stop being upset that's annoying" way) sadness or anxiety or the braced statements of a person (often perceived as rude) used to having to repeat, for the 50th time, something people don't want to hear. I do have the empathy to recognize this when a customer service agent does it and cut them the slack because probably had to spend all their empathy on someone else.

            Then I read about things like surface acting vs deep acting and see that the surface acting part is bad for your emotional health but that deep acting takes a lot of extra energy [1]!

            Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?

            "that's all it takes" might be underselling the dynamic here.

            [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/interrupting-coop... https://archive.is/I4RpG

            [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor#Surface_and_de...

            • johnnyanmac

              yesterday at 8:04 AM

              >Yes, some people thrive on talking to a lot of people. For everyone else, it can be exhausting. It's hard to navigate social differences talking to 15+ strangers every hour for 8 hours a day.

              Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.

              >So either I would have to lie and say "wow, that must be so frustrating", which is not empathy,

              Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.

              >And that brings me next to the next thing I don't understand... either that person was also lying or somehow people have the ability to just contemporaneously download the feelings of other people, feel them, but also not act like they're feeling them

              Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.

              >Finally I ask the question of am I evolved to even be able to socially interact with 120 strangers in a given day?

              Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.

              Given how we're still actively drowning people, I don't see us coming together soon.

              • dqv

                yesterday at 8:31 PM

                This is missing the forest for the trees. You are ignoring the wider corpus of the individual's experiences in favor of a single negative interaction, and then using that single interaction, isolated from all their other experiences, to judge the entirety of their character.

                > Okay. It's a job. I know choices are slim, but "its hard for my mental state" has never been a satisfactory excuse to further displease customers.

                The chemical reality of the the frontal lobe getting exhausted is not an "excuse". It still misses the forest for the trees: if your frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for social understanding, reasoning, executive function, and information recall [0]) is taxed, you are way less likely to even understand that you're displeasing the customer! The ultimate irony here is the tool needed to understand how to not do that thing anymore is also the frontal lobe.

                > Sometimes a little white lie is easier than a cold hard truth. Just ask any salesman.

                That's a nice way to soften it, but pretending to empathize with someone who you're not actually empathizing with sounds psychopathic. I don't want to model my behavior nor do I want anyone else to model their behavior after an industry that is known for dark triad personalities [1]. A lie is still a lie and lying about something so intimate as feeling their experiences doesn't sit right with me at all. You should read the link I posted in my earlier comment which discusses surface acting and how it is very taxing on the individual.

                > Given the author is blind, I imagine he's better than average at reading the tone of voice. He could have interpreted it wrong, but I'm sure this dismissive tone isn't new to him.

                Reading a stranger's tone is a guess and negativity bias affects our perception of a stranger's intent [2]. The sum of their total negative experiences absolutely can make them interpret someone else's tone as having "dismissive" intent even though it's just as likely to be what I already described: braced speech in anticipation for a person responding to something they don't want to hear.

                And there you can see negativity bias on both sides! The difference is that the representative gets no post-call time to consider what happened before they have to take the next call and they have the issue of not really having the foresight to actively introspect and keep a strong sense of understanding the situation the customer is going through. (As a reminder, both foresight and introspection require some level of functioning frontal lobe, which is already getting juiced for the next social interaction that's about to happen).

                > Probably not. But I'm not sure what you want me to say. I don't want to be the same as Karen and say "suck it up, it's a job. But this is such a commin feeling on modern society. If we aren't going to collectively rise against its, we're bearing the flood alone.

                I'm not sure what you mean, you effectively said "suck it up, it's a job" at the beginning of your comment when you said "Okay. It's a job". Of course no one wants to be the same as Karen, Karen doesn't want to be the same as Karen, but as I've already explained, is incapable of extricating herself from the dysfunction! Her frontal lobe is shot!

                But the author? He does have that capability after the interaction. He is an author, with time to introspect. He chose to be an ass hole instead. Of course, his growth over the years has been stunted by the way he has been treated. I am not in the business of dredging up someone's life experiences and putting them on display, but he has painful experiences beyond being blind in a society not built for blind people.

                But I have the privilege of being able to see all that and take it into consideration. Karen does not. She doesn't have the hint about his upbringing that I do. She probably doesn't have the time or mental capacity to introspect, and consider, if what she's doing makes people feel bad.

                I can fault neither of these people for being ass holes, because that would amount to faulting them for their upbringing, faulting them for the situation they're in.

                > But I'm not sure what you want me to say.

                I don't want you to say anything, I want you to think about what empathy really means beyond the surface level. That this isn't a situation where anyone should be trying to say "who has experienced the most hardship" so we can pick who wins empathy and who gets labelled an ass hole for perpetuity.

                I want people to stop doing the thing where they only empathize with the person most like them and instead try to feel what it's like to be like the person who is least like them. Sometimes that's not intuitive. Just because the dude is blind doesn't mean he isn't more like you than the person who isn't.

                [0]: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24501-frontal-lob... [1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90775564/the-dark-side-of-the-sa... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias#Attribution_of...

      • mrguyorama

        last Friday at 5:37 PM

        >I don't think the author would have acted this way toward someone who said "sorry, I know it's a burden, I know it's stressful to be at risk of losing these benefits, and I've told that to everyone I can repeatedly."

        Have you seen how much public sector employees taking calls get paid to be abused all day?

        If you want people with limitless wells of compassion, pay better. Public sector jobs generally get to scrape the bottom of the barrel and compete with the local grocery store.

• simgt

  last Friday at 2:31 PM

  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.

• tryauuum

  last Friday at 3:52 PM

  fascinating. And who is that mythical person in charge

  I tried to delete my account on GitHub. I could not. The gdpr compliance email address they provide happily accepts emails but my account is still there, after more than 3 months.

  Why am I writing this here? To show you an example of being powerless to the system. The only things I can do is things you can call "petty", like wearing a "Microsoft employees deserve Gulag" t-shirt. Since I tried many other options and failed multiple times

The 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

• jerf

  last Friday at 3:10 PM

  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.

• miek

  last Friday at 1:38 PM

  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.

• neoCrimeLabs

  last Friday at 1:33 PM

  Yeah, there are also business that provide this as a service.

  • harvey9

    last Friday at 2:15 PM

    Funny to think of the author sending documents to a computer-to-fax service and the recipient doing the reverse.

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.

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?

• calcifer

  last Friday at 2:10 PM

  > 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.

• dqv

  yesterday at 4:52 AM

  The author has existed online since at least 2011, so it wouldn't surprise me that he has just accumulated posts over time and migrated them, maybe haphazardly, to new installations. He's reader-funded which would explain what looks like some lost domain registrations over the years.

• phyzome

  last Friday at 3:18 PM

  People migrate their blogs.

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.

• 0x3f

  last Friday at 3:09 PM

  They're overly cautious about creating inadvertent structural forms of discrimination. Although perhaps they're not actually paranoid, given some recent court rulings.

• tokai

  last Friday at 2:50 PM

  >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/

  • 0x3f

    last Friday at 3:08 PM

    That's presumably what the word 'fully' is being employed for.

    • tokai

      last Friday at 3:14 PM

      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.

      • squigz

        last Friday at 3:43 PM

        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.

> 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.

• john_strinlai

  last Friday at 2:30 PM

  for some reason, you forgot to copy/paste the rest of the sentence, which continues with:

  "and nonfiction where life can, sometimes, be educational."

  • rdtsc

    last Friday at 2:53 PM

    > 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.

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?

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.

• padjo

  last Friday at 4:12 PM

  Yeah there's no way a fax actually gets printed for this. I worked in an admin role like this 25 years ago and incoming faxes went straight to PDF on a network share even back then.

• ocimbote

  last Friday at 3:40 PM

  Minus the AI part, I agree. I'm 100% convinced many fax machines nowadays exist just for bureaucracy and are actually fax-to-pdf.

  • estebank

    last Friday at 4:48 PM

    If the genersted PDFs are stored encrypted in an accessible server with proper access control, then that is a measurable improvement over email containing medical informstion that a random citizen would send, which would be bouncing around unencrypted around at least one third party SMTP server. Of course, if then that person uses an online Fax service, they are sharing that information with at least one other party...

    And that's even without considering the security benefit of not receiving files that could be compromised, instead generating a file from an image stream. (Now I'm trying to picture what a daisy chain of exploits would be needed to craft a malicious Fax.)

Great read. While I admire the spite, I question the wisdom of pissing off a government employee with the power to deny your benefits.

• rgblambda

  last Friday at 9:42 PM

  And a government employee, who was only explaining in a polite, matter of fact way, what their department policy and government legislation allowed them to do.

  If the story is true (I know it's labelled 'nonfiction' but c'mon) then likely the only reason the fax spamming worked is because the department policy prevented them from blocking numbers outside of very narrow circumstances.

> 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.

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.

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.

• apical_dendrite

  last Friday at 5:51 PM

  You'd be surprised how many doctors still rely on a physical fax machine.

  • kayodelycaon

    last Friday at 7:59 PM

    I was thinking of doctors offices and pharmacies when I asked. My doctor has a physical fax machine in the back of the office.

    I was hoping things might be a little bit more advanced elsewhere. It hurts my soul to see people print a document to fax it before throwing it away.

    I was going to say it would be nice if you would just choose a fax machine from the print dialogue. You can… if it’s set up. Sigh.

    • efreak

      yesterday at 2:53 AM

      You can do the reverse, too. Hook up a dial-up modem to your PC and you can send and receive faxes on it. The software is built-in, though you'll probably want to configure it not to receive faxes automatically on your landline unless it's dedicated for that purpose. This has been built into Windows since at least Windows xp, probably been possible since 3.x. There's also Linux and probably Mac software available too. In Windows 11, I think the fax program isn't installed by default anymore, you might have to add it via optionalfeatures.exe.

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.

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.

• abright

  last Friday at 1:56 PM

  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.

• fainpul

  last Friday at 1:58 PM

  This is not a US thing, this is a bureaucracy thing. You can enjoy that worldwide (at least in every "civilized" country).

  • folbec

    last Friday at 2:25 PM

    I can confirm this from France.

• wholinator2

  last Friday at 2:05 PM

  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.

• hooverd

  last Friday at 6:24 PM

  Maybe, you'd be absolutely rolled by fraudsters in the opposite case.

• mrguyorama

  last Friday at 5:47 PM

  Karen is forced to respect the law. The law around benefits is absolutely full of this exact bullshit in the US, because of 50 years of people screeching about "Welfare queens" which was an invented thing.

  It doesn't matter what Karen thinks or wants. It doesn't matter if Karen believes the disabled person or not. It doesn't matter if Karen is physically capable of complex thought or not. If Karen breaks the rules for you, you will end up losing your benefits anyway, possibly forced to pay them back, and Karen loses her job.

  Public sector employment pays terribly. People don't really do it because they enjoy it.

  There is literal law all over that says "This information can't be in an email for privacy reasons". It's not policy, it's law.

  Stop harassing low level bureaucrats and learn some damn civics.

  Similarly, when I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had zero ability to refund you, to fix a problem, to bend any rule for example to help you with your WIC process, which was utterly miserable. Oh sorry the pamphlet this week says X bread is the only approved one, it doesn't matter that it causes your child GI distress, nobody is allowed to change it.

  Vote for people who aren't trying to hurt disabled people and you will have fewer disabled people being hurt. Stop screeching about "Fraud" that doesn't exist if you want it to be easy for people to get the welfare they need.

  All attempts to battle fraud will inherently add friction to the process. Find an optimization point that isn't so hostile to human beings.

I don't believe this is actually real, but it was great to read nonetheless.

• r_lee

  last Friday at 1:25 PM

  it's fictional, it says that in the bottom (nvm, tagged nonfictional)

  • john_strinlai

    last Friday at 1:51 PM

    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.

  • solfox

    last Friday at 1:40 PM

    It actually doesn't say that.

  • nanoxide

    last Friday at 1:32 PM

    It's also tagged "nonfiction" though

  • actionfromafar

    last Friday at 1:45 PM

    Yes, clearly. Something like this could never happen in the real healthcare system, that would be absurd.

Reminds me of Harry Tuttle from Brazil. And then the surreal scene where he becomes a magnet for government receipts and disappears under a pile of them

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.

Well, I'd appreciate Karen is willing to talk and explain whatever inconvenient policies they have. A faceless bureaucracy is even more desperate.

My wife and I had many troubles (delays due to additional security checks, endless request for documents) in visa and all immigration-related applications in the US. We cannot even find a government official to complain. Email inquires all end up with boilerplate responses. Many agencies do not have phone services, and even if some do, you are connected to an unhelpful call center worker who can only provide generic info and have no permissions to discuss your problems. And lawyers told us we could do little because all the procedures are legitimate. We may (and we did once in the past) sue the government but only after an "unreasonable" delay, at which point much harm is already caused.

This week the US consulate emailed me to ask for official documents about a minor past civil suit against me in China, including "a police certificate", for my visa application. Why the heck does the US visa have anything to do with a civil suit, and in which country does a civil suit involve police?

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.

• phyzome

  last Friday at 3:20 PM

  I don't think this author uses LLMs. I follow them online and they hate generative AI.

  • speedgoose

    last Friday at 4:31 PM

    I guess I don’t like their style then. My bad. Sorry about that.

    • phyzome

      yesterday at 1:18 AM

      I've misattributed a similar writing style to AI a couple times now, which I also feel bad about.

      But yeah, this is essentially the writing style that LLMs are mimicking.

• WindyMiller

  last Friday at 2:19 PM

  [How confident are you that this writer uses AI?](https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-colonization-of-con...)

  • shimman

    last Friday at 2:30 PM

    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.

• firesteelrain

  last Friday at 1:50 PM

  Giving them a pass since he or she is blind. The text is also very large intentionally

  • harvey9

    last Friday at 2:11 PM

    I'm grateful for that. I never liked the hn default size even when my eyes were younger.

    • rogerrogerr

      last Friday at 2:33 PM

      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.

• undeveloper

  last Friday at 3:07 PM

  https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...

• hyperhello

  last Friday at 1:50 PM

  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.

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.

What, a government agency doesn't have incoming fax servers that create PDF files? I had a service for that twenty years ago, for both incoming and outgoing faxes. Cost a few dollars a month, flat rate.

(Now if LibreOffice could edit PDFs decently... My tax accountant sent me a PDF to fill in, but LibreOffice can't get the text and the lines to line up.)

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)

• 0x3f

  last Friday at 3:06 PM

  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.

  • skyyler

    last Friday at 3:15 PM

    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

  • breppp

    last Friday at 7:28 PM

    I was talking about the receiving end and at least in the context of this story we are talking about a fax machine, not some fancy document server. Point being that a fax has too many failure modes, which is a feature in these places

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…

And then everybody, including the fax machine, stood up and clapped.

This reminds me of a story from BOFH ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell ), where he used a black piece of paper, put it into the fax machine, glued both ends together, so the fax scanned an endless roll of black paper and pressed send.

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.

• r_lee

  last Friday at 1:26 PM

  it's fiction (seemingly everything is on the site?). maybe the title should reflect that

  • mzajc

    last Friday at 1:32 PM

    It's tagged "nonfiction" just below the title.

  • last Friday at 1:32 PM

  • moss_dog

    last Friday at 1:33 PM

    It's tagged nonfiction.

  • hyperhello

    last Friday at 1:40 PM

    Apparently we have a case of discerning truth by whether we’re downvoting someone saying it’s fiction.

The SSA is one of the largest federal employers of blind people. "Karen" could easily be a blind woman on the other end of that call, also below the poverty line on a GS-nothing salary, who now has to deal with a fax machine (hopefully virtual!) she also can't see spitting out 512 pages and jamming. This guy is ... Something.

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.

• richiebful1

  last Friday at 3:59 PM

  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.

Outstanding. May his fax endure forever.

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.

• lelanthran

  last Friday at 4:22 PM

  Agreed. This is fiction. A mere 500 pages isn't going to exhaust the toner of a printer installed specifically to recieve faxes all day, every day.

  And there being an actual printer is even less likely. Even back in 2008, it was almost impossible to find an actual fax machine, even though businesses had fax numbers, they stopped needing machines.

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.

entirely AI generated

https://www.pangram.com/history/964171e9-7cc9-45c9-9da0-f6b0...

This reads like fiction.

> I opened my preferred internet faxing service. This is a tool that allows me to send a fax purely through digital data. It would cost $20, exactly the amount someone had donated to the blog last week, but if I didn't do this, I would lose all my benifits. It costs me zero paper. It costs me zero toner.

> ...

> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.

I doubt it it would actually happen that way. My guess is there's a very high chance that the recipient is also using some kind of internet faxing service. So no actual paper was harmed by this prank.

> Two hours later, my phone rang...

> "Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."

Oh yeah. Total fiction. Can't you stop a real fax machine by hanging up the phone? They work with dial-up. I wouldn't be surprised if there's also a "cancel print" button.

It's 2026 and they're still rejecting email for security while asking for 500 page faxes. Hilarious and depressing at the same time.

That left me with a big satisfied smile - hard to believe these people still exist, but they do, well done I say, well done!

It was basically "** you" delivered with the power of 1024 middle fingers (512 pages times both hands).

Take a job helping the disabled claim benefits they said. It'll be nice and you can help disabled people they said.

Every country has different norms about these things.

If it were India, you have to pay a 'tax', mostly directly to the bureaucrat or using the workflow setup by the bureaucrat -- its another person outside 'taking care' of these things or his security guard/watchman or another low level employee. It can't be done remotely, you have to go to office and figure out the workflow and the right person. Most third world countries have some version of this configuration.

In US, there are lawyers who get you disability, no problem, they take care of everything for you, and take 50%. Millions of people are on fake disability thanks to these kind lawyers.

Ultimately, most people in Govt (politicians/bureaucrats) are entitled to ALL the money that Govt collects (steals?), and they have different ways of collecting their money. This is just human nature. The Trump regime shows the most innovative ways of doing this, it is quite admirable.

I love malicious compliance, but it's more fun when you suffer along with them.

Robert: youre website is among the most visually attractive ones Ive seen.

As a government employee, enmeshed in the bureaucracy:

This is the way.

The problem is that it took Karen zero effort to say “we only accept fax”. She doesn’t care about how much effort it takes you you — in fact, as implied, it taking you a tremendous amount of effort actually reduces her effort. In order to make a dent, you have to figure out a way for the idiotic policy to impact the person making and/or enforcing it. That’s the only way it ever changes.

This is proof that you don't need vision to create a thing of beauty.

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.

One of the biggest problems with this story is Karen phoning back and asking him to stop the fax.

Sorry, but faxes don’t work like this.

A fax takes in the entire transmission over the phone line, ends the call, and then - IF it has been set up to do so, instead of just storing the fax - it prints it out.

Which means that Karen had every ability to tell her fax to stop the print job herself. A fax is not like a printer, where the sender has the ability to tell the printer to pause or cancel the job. Once the fax starts printing, that original communication - the phone call with the fax transmission - has long since ended.

And if this fax machine can retrieve faxes from a fax server elsewhere on the network or on the Internet, that communications disconnect is even more severe.

Which makes me very suspicious of the entire story.

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.

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.

• squigz

  last Friday at 3:54 PM

  Considering the sentiments usually expressed on HN, it's kind of shocking the ratio of people judging the people vs those judging the system.

Disabled, fake and gay. Oh my.

Inspiring, Nietzchean even.

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.

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.

> "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’m a bit surprised they haven’t migrated to digital fax reception a long time ago.

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

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.

• mock-possum

  last Friday at 2:12 PM

  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.

Yea, the front service desk worker doesn't deserve that shit. Dick move.

• lelanthran

  last Friday at 4:25 PM

  Should be a law that every person spends 2 years at first line customer service before they are eligible for working anywhere else.

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.

• last Friday at 1:43 PM

• tomq

  last Friday at 1:51 PM

  Yeah GPTZero says 100% AI generated

Oh boy.

I’m dealing with IRS right now to get an EIN for an LLC. They won’t give an EIN over online form. Must be faxed or physically mailed.

They say 3-5 days. Been weeks. I pay $5/week to hold onto a fax number.

So Trump spending hundreds of billions on blowing up kids’ schools in Iran and cutting funding from IRS.

Why does it take weeks to start a business in 2026 and get a bank account.

Just absurd.

• dqv

  yesterday at 2:24 AM

  Hmm the online EIN form will give you an EIN instantly unless you don't have an ITIN or you are incorporated outside the US, in which case you would have to do it offline. https://sa.www4.irs.gov/applyein/

  I remember using it and worrying about losing the EIN at the last step, so I saved the document several times and printed it several times too.

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.

FFS there’s no fax machine on the other end. There no paper or ink. It’s all electronic.

This reads like LLM slop. gptzero says 98%.

It also appears to be a confession of intentional vandalism of government property, despite the author admitting that they already knew how to send a fax via website, which is as convenient as email.

And, believe it or not, yes, some people do in fact receive treatment that cures a disability.

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.

A protagonist in a pathetic revenge fantasy so insufferably smug that they actually reward themselves with a cookie at the end. Gag me.

• java-man

  last Friday at 3:05 PM

  what's wrong with you?

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• smallpipe

  last Friday at 2:26 PM

  Having a bad day eh, let’s be mean to the disabled o the internet

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.

• whynotmaybe

  last Friday at 2:21 PM

  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.

• last Friday at 1:38 PM

• last Friday at 1:38 PM

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.

• guzfip

  last Friday at 4:00 PM

  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.