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by mothballed8 hours ago |
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upvoteby TeMPOraL8 hours ago|
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> 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.

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upvoteby catapart8 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL7 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby TheOtherHobbes6 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby johnnyanmac6 hours ago|
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>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.

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upvoteby catapart6 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby Etherlord877 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL7 hours ago|
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More likely they'd just cancel the benefits.
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upvoteby p_l6 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby johnnyanmac6 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby mothballed7 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby watwut6 hours ago|
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Yes, the republican dominated congress will allocate more money for these, because some social service manager is screeching over pdfs. Really?
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upvoteby johnnyanmac6 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby TeMPOraL5 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby johnnyanmac4 hours ago|
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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.

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