Are We Dying From a Thousand Paper Cuts?

At times, life seems to be slip-sliding away.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Have you tried to contact someone in government lately — like, say, the motor vehicle department?

That’s the one fresh on my mind.

I sense the problem is from sea-to-shining-sea, however — at all levels of the bureaucratic hive.

Go to the website and try to find someone’s phone number or email.

You can’t.

What you get instead are contact forms to fill out. They will get back with you in the order your note was received — which is insider only information.

Or, if you call a help line on your phone, you end up punching in numbers to first validate who you are. The problem I had with that one was it told me I entered the wrong date for my birthday. No, I know that date and I’m pretty sure the problem wasn’t on my end. This forced me to hang up and call on a landline.

Little annoyances like these feel like being nibbled to death by hungry minnows.

On one form it asked for my mobile phone number including area code. I typed it in but didn’t at first parenthesize the area code and then put a space between area code and the rest, not to mention hyphenate the remaining seven digits in order to separate the front three from the back four. Just putting in the numbers is the way many forms prefer it now days. Fewer formatting errors. In my case, no instructions as to the acceptable format were given. Instead, when I tried to submit the entire form at the end, it just locked up. That one took me thirty minutes of my life to figure out. I don’t feel better or smarter.

At first I thought its refusal to submit my form had to do with a trick question at the end where it wanted me to prove to its Artificial Intelligent self that I was human. It asked me to write down some letters that were written in a distorted way and with a background of dots. But then it didn’t just display letters. There were numbers as well. Was it testing me on whether or not I knew the difference between letters and numbers?

Does it seem to anyone else that creating difficult complaint processes reduces the work load as well as provides better looking statistics for the organization’s end-of-year job performance report? This problem is most common when the workers are paid by a third party, like tax payers, rather than customers.

Now I didn’t bring this up to just complain. Yes, it feels good to complain, but I also think it provides an opportunity to remind us all to not let this stuff get to us. It reminds me how critically important it really is to seek quiet moments through the day to decompress.

Laughing is also a good outlet.

So is taking a walk.

Praying helps relieve stress as well, especially when we are able to transfer our burdens over to bigger shoulders than our own.