Enduring Bureaucracy
Orlans, Harold
SURELY, A SECTOR of the Inferno is reserved for bureaucrats. Bound together with unburnable paper chains, they shuffle along, hopeless, exhausted, in an endless, hell-girdling queue with neither...
...The glories of the Internet are trumpeted from so many pulpits that its hazards and failings can be neglected...
...feudal, capitalist, or communist...
...Eventually, after a seemingly inDISSENT / Summer 2001 63 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY terminable contest between bureaucratic delay and human survival, the annuity was recognized and payment begun...
...This is Not a Bill" BlueCross says...
...A central theme in conservatives' attack on government (it takes your money...
...Pepco's response...
...Affluent persons need not themselves struggle with the queues, red tape, impasses, delays, and errors of overburdened, indifferent, or incompetent bureaucrats...
...and automated sales pitches...
...cheaper insurance...
...the other half goes to administrators, advertisers, billers, and payers, those who produce and shuffle paper...
...Remedies Why are some bureaucracies good and efficient and others anything from middling to miserable...
...Normally, the efficiency of our variegated institutions ranges from quiet reliability to tolerable or intolerable disorder...
...Former vice president Al Gore's efforts at "reinventing government" would have been more convincing if they had led not merely to fewer employees but to demonstrably better services...
...In abstract theory, there may be something to this, but in daily reality it is true of certain goods and services, not others...
...Late one night, I saw a spineless cat shrink from a large rat that lumbered from gutter to sidewalk and into a crevice under a fashionable restaurant...
...It distributed a brochure detailing the cost of operating a home generator and the appropriate size for various appliances...
...She had no record or recollection of the check...
...the methods of financing and providing health care are...
...Employee resistance to exploitation accounts for some, but far from most, bureaucratic crimes and misdemeanors...
...She had an ear infection and could not hear on the phone...
...Perhaps half of national health expenditures goes for actual care...
...they fuss about food and drink, their digestion, bowels, bladder, late hours, sleep...
...Insurance, airline, and credit card companies have large promotional budgets and aggressive staffs...
...Are they charitable or professional, income or capital gain...
...Then services may improve, if not as much as we would like...
...I will detail irritating or bruising encounters with public and private bureaucracies, and then consider what might be done about them...
...I long for a little stability, not more change...
...Renewal notices commence half a year before a subscription expires, and fresh invitations to subscribe arrive frequently...
...Health maintenance organizations, Robert Kuttner writes, are "private bureaucracies hated by doctors and patients alike...
...Local legislators and congressional representatives may help citizens press claims against unjust government bureaucrats...
...producing and sustaining the machines, repairers, programmers, and operators who spew forth this paper must decimate forests, speed global warming, and consume a major portion of the nation's health costs...
...A Montgomery County official speaks of a "bureaucratic culture...
...Many advertising lures only camouflage the meaninglessness of choosing one touted service over another...
...What are "the Terms and Conditions...
...Yet in the last year, between us we have seen nine doctors, three surgeons, and two dentists...
...According to Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, our health system "has by far the highest overhead costs in the world...
...Every day's newspaper or mail brings offers of bargain flights...
...A company director and janitor may both have the key to a private bathroom, but that is the only privilege they share...
...The child welfare agency was in such chaos that staff did not know where they had placed abused and neglected children...
...MODERN SOCIETY is built of bureaucracy as a wall is built of brick...
...Bureaucracy is endemic...
...Once again, money makes the difference: the county is wealthier, pays higher salaries, and has an easier time recruiting good employees...
...Did this rule or simple witlessness operate when I sought permission to reprint a Washington Post op-ed article...
...The American Medical Association warns about the horrendous red tape of national health systems, but can it be worse than the red tape of our present system...
...Deregulation, that purported cure for countless economic and social ills, fostered lower airfares and, in a strong economy, boosted air travel so much as to overtax airport and airline facilities and passenger endurance...
...A protracted series of phone calls and letters to ever higher administrators ended in silence, the first and last resort of bureaucracy...
...As another winter approached, a full-page Pepco ad declared, "we're . . . 99.97 percent reliable . . . .But we can't prevent...
...Five "plans...
...A bureaucracy that readily and willingly addresses complaints, corrects errors, replaces defective products, and remedies deficient service is functioning well...
...How do blind, senile, peripatetic, and forgetful people manage...
...Final responsibility for bureaucratic mismanagement often lodges with national politicians and executives...
...Read Your Medicare Summary Notice carefully for accuracy of dates, services, and amounts billed" the form says...
...Telephone tag can last so long you forget why it started...
...Mostly Private Bureaucracies Private bureaucracies are at least as exasperating as public...
...The assault teams who release laboratory animals from their cages should mount a campaign to disable the automated answering systems that shield agencies, companies, and stores from the public...
...I phoned and got a sequence of automated choices with no provision for callers from a rotary phone...
...I reported this experience to Dr...
...Please stay on the line and your call will be answered by the next available operator...
...COMPETMON, it is said, lowers prices, improves quality, spurs efficiency and service, and makes our economy the wonder of nations...
...Some children were housed in an office building, violating a court order...
...They are grit in the mills of society and grit gets into the mills of every society...
...Efficient bureaucracies are necessary to a satisfactory society...
...passengers held captive on runways or forced to spend the night 68 . DISSENT / Summer 2001 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY at airports have led to . . . a promised code of airline good conduct...
...In the former, queues are longer and patience shorter, employees too often talk with one another, neglect the public, and proceed at what seems a too deliberate pace...
...Why had she not replied...
...Lawyers and accountants need not hire other lawyers and accountants to act on their behalf...
...Perhaps private, because you have, or feel you have, less recourse...
...Because the Post did not own the copyright of the article...
...their secretary, chauffeur, chef, or assistant can do that if contacts and money don't 66 • DISSENT / Summer 2001 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY open a privileged path for them...
...Schools are in constant crisis with decrepit buildings and equipment, violence and outrageous conduct, the turnover and shortage of staff, frequent changes in top management, and congressional and court intrusions...
...She held neither job long enough (five years) to qualify for a retirement annuity, but both together sufficed...
...Are we ready to pay higher postage for better mail service, higher charges for more solicitous airline, store, and professional services...
...The comparative nonresponse rates of mail and E-mail inquiries have yet to be compiled...
...E-mail can help you get a response from organizations and individuals who are sufficiently interested and efficient to respond...
...the ills of business, by investors, managers, and employees as well as by customers and clients...
...their hearing and sight and energy weaken...
...restricts your freedom...
...all are periodically jarred and require repair and maintenance...
...Managers and efficiency experts endlessly examine it, but, considering its importance and omnipresence, intellectuals have neglected its daily operations...
...Disobeying a message that assigned one line to referring physicians, I spoke to a woman who hung up...
...Applicants say that their inquiries and submissions are lost or unanswered...
...Where the rich retain personal and professional staff to deal with bureaucracies, others must resort to public and voluntary services...
...He had a phone, answered it, and promised that the perDISSENT / Summer 2001 • 65 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY missions editor would call...
...HAROLD ORLANS served on the founding board of Dissent and last wrote for the magazine in 1954...
...I waited, no one answered...
...don't explain, reexamine, or change it...
...The confidence in government that liberals and socialists share emphasizes the goals of public programs, but often disregards the humdrum realities of their administration and maladministration, upon which the programs can stumble...
...their tasks are clear and sensible (perhaps also interesting and significant...
...that is, I can conveniently get the same or similar food, book, and flight at different (not always significantly different) prices...
...Still, if I inquire about a missing parcel or the failure to confirm delivery of a registered letter, postal officials prove to be prize graduates of the College of Bureaucracy: someone else, never the person I talk to, is always responsible...
...Teacher and hospital worker unions have formed citizen alliances, arguing that higher wages and increased staffing will improve the quality of education and patient care...
...When I returned a word processor for repair under a service contract, the model was no longer being manufactured...
...greetings by strangers...
...Many of these features are absent in a poorly functioning bureaucracy or, if present, are outweighed by other factors—an unreasonable workload, excessive demands of managers, deadeningly repetitive chores—that damage morale and performance...
...Unless you keep tidy records—you should be a bookkeeper for the private sector as well as for the IRS— you can pay twice for the same magazine...
...The question is worth exploring...
...Volunteers from the American Association of Retired Persons help elderly people with their financial records and bills...
...cheery "How are you today, Harold...
...again...
...Nonprofit cultural, educational, and intellectual institutions can operate in the same maddeningly mechanized way as commercial and governmental bureaucracies...
...Someone said it is the little things that keep us from doing big things...
...Giant Food, the Washington area supermarket chain, accepts the return of mistaken, damaged, or spoiled purchases, no questions asked, and refunds cash on the spot...
...Put to a vote, will Americans prefer frequent aggravations to the cost of better goods and services...
...schools of administration are deemed archaic...
...potted plants add a homelike touch and make the occasional short wait more pleasant...
...But less tractable conflicts (for example, the location of new roads and schools, the size of the police or school budget— and of the property tax) must be fought out in county and state offices, courts, and elections...
...All citizens cannot enjoy these comforts, but all can receive fair and satisfactory service if that is deemed important and if the requisite financial and human resources are provided...
...You can't devote your life to rectifying it...
...On one hospital visit, I was questioned by three different record-takers, none of whom seemed to know about the other two...
...When personal mediators are absent, money can substitute: to the affluent, fines and penalties are simply a standard cost of dodging standard regulations...
...At best, we can hope to reduce it, to filter the bureaucratic air we all breathe...
...At times, major institutions (the Chicago mails in 1966, many campuses in the 1960s, air transportation and California electric power today) are close to collapse...
...Change or purported change, "innovation" or "progress" is the all-American vice...
...the columnist, Dr...
...In the District of Columbia, garbage overflows on sidewalks and alleys so that rats flourish...
...To be sure, they must have a just and useful purpose...
...Farmhands, dressmakers, nurses, and teachers who work long hours for little money do better under lax rather than stringent managers...
...Drivers can face awesome queues and repeat visits at the Motor Vehicle Department...
...Though I live half an hour from the Pentagon, the Social Security Administration, and other vast government bureaucracies, I grapple more often with private than public bureaucracy and cannot decide which is worse...
...When the time comes to write the four checks for current and estimated federal and state tax, I wince but am relieved that the labor is done...
...the filters must be changed often and monitored constantly...
...EIGHBORHOOD residents' groups often invite local leaders—school principals...
...Fortunately, the typical bureaucratic impasse, injustice, or folly is frustrating but not life threatening...
...The U.S...
...Part-time faculty and teaching assistants are making similar efforts in higher education...
...their phone calls ring and ring or yield conflicting answers...
...I received no reply...
...She did...
...when you reach the counter, you meet a live, often smiling, clerk...
...At age sixty-five, she inquired about her benefits...
...It is almost impossible to separate the ills of society—which, historically entrenched, will take historical forces to change—from the more readily correctable ills of a specific institution...
...The state agency confirmed her employment but UC said she had withdrawn from the system and had been sent a check reimbursing her payments...
...BlueCross offers a toll free number with "access to registered nurses who can help you assess your symptoms," explanations of eleven "Terms You Should Know" (coinsurance, precertification penalty, catastrophic protection, etc...
...With and without known cause, blackouts of minutes or hours are common...
...However, dialing "operator" prompted the message, "All George Washington primary care associate operators are busy right now...
...Some jacks are inaccessible and some phones unsilenceable...
...Without determining that she was already on medication, a GWU doctor prescribed an antibiotic...
...After taking it, she phoned me to say she felt dizzy...
...The preparatory work is the most troubling: sorting receipts, hunting for and finding no 62 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY records, having to estimate and especially to allocate expenditures and income...
...Financially, their—and our—accounts are a mess (except for my dentist: with no dental insurance, I present a Visa card, pay on the spot, and that is the end of it...
...One resident, ticketed for lacking a residential parking permit that was plainly displayed on his windshield, received, months later, a reminder to renew the permit together with a notice to pay the fine for not having it...
...But the benefits of special knowledge are usually confined to one domain...
...The value of wealth and power is the number and variety of doors it can open...
...What can reasonably and feasibly be done to improve the latter...
...those who benefit from such services are spared much trouble—and the experts' knowledge of contracts and administrative procedures produces larger payments than others receive from health insurers...
...Decent performance can be demanded of all institutions in a decent society...
...He thanks Michael Walzer, Lou Nayman, and Karen Spatz Orlansky for information and suggestions...
...after five years' use, Sears repaid the full purchase price, about $800...
...My sister was enrolled in the George Washington University Health Plan...
...making and correcting errors...
...each time, the improper charges were cancelled and a new card was issued promptly...
...flight misinformation, delays, and diversions...
...Alan Wasserman, medical director of the GWU Health Plan and suggested he add a line with a live operator for emergencies...
...Phones are an indispensable, ineradicable nuisance with their dunning, dinner-time calls...
...dialed again, again no one...
...An excess of information produces not meaningful communication and knowledge but noise, chaos, and, perhaps, panic and disaster...
...I phoned again and could not penetrate the automated messages...
...I can choose a gas station, supermarket, restaurant, department store, bookstore (real or virtual), or airline...
...they can delegate these torments to personal staff and professional retainers: lawyers, accountants, household and money managers...
...Whatever the solution, the causes of the bureaucratic snafus, paper blizzards, service blockages, and treatment shortfalls are not just local but national, not just individual incompetence but a product of economic and social arrangements...
...high winds or heavy snow or ice . . ." Nor, apparently, can it put lines underground...
...Each spring, the streets are pocked with potholes like no man's land...
...Since then, he has been, among other things, an analyst for the National Science Foundation, director of studies for the White House Conference on Children and Youth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, special assistant to the U.S...
...T]he price for your Optional Wire Maintenance Plan for inside wire maintenance will increase from $1.25 to $2.45 per line per month . . . . By paying this charge, you will be letting us know that you have decided to continue your protection under the plan . . . .The plan covers repairs to 64 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY all standard inside wire and jack(s) covered by the plan as described in the Terms and Conditions of the plan...
...copying and shuffling financial and medical papers between doctors, hospitals, Medicare, insurers, payers, and payees...
...There is a dangerous shortage of fire engines...
...Montgomery County borders the District, yet its schools, garbage removal, road repairs, police and ambulance services, professional and auto licensing are generally far better...
...The Two•Class System I doubt that clever policy wonks or a mass consumer campaign led by a new Nader can eliminate all the aggravations I have related...
...We have admirable care for those who can afford it and less admirable, truncated care for those who can't...
...The middle classes can afford only an occasional middle-class accountant and lawyer...
...Every donation generates countless additional requests—not an incentive to donate again...
...The magical market cannot eradicate the very plague it spawns...
...In the last six years, mergers and acquisitions have given me three new bank accounts and checkbooks, three new credit cards, and one new home insurer, all with compendious instructions and regulations...
...Why are regular subscribers penalized by not-so-smart marketers...
...At her place, I read the prescription instructions: if you become dizzy, call your doctor immediately...
...District staff do not...
...Local employee unions attribute queuing for medical and welfare services to staff shortages...
...Postal Service is a monumental organization with some thirty thousand post offices and eight hundred thousand employees, far more than any government agency except the Defense Department...
...Error spreads rapidly and is archived permanently...
...Our small local post office gives good, courteous service...
...Cronyism and corruption marred former mayor Marion Barry's regime, and it takes forceful means, time, and continued vigilance to clean and keep clean a messy, crowded house...
...The bills come from doctors and hospitals—rather, from the billing henchpeople posted at the entrance or exit of every medical facility...
...I phoned and got an automated instruction to write...
...It dined better than many residents...
...board first, relax or work in comfort en route...
...Police are so dilatory investigating murders that suspects murder again...
...A former bookkeeper sorts papers for months, calculates and recalculates expenditures to the penny, never finishes on time, gets an extension, and pays a penalty...
...UC had destroyed the records...
...I pay one to prepare the forms, but why should this be necessary...
...Corporations, universities, and research institutes often hire experts to manage senior employees' medical bills...
...Leave aside the streets that armed police will not enter unaccompanied: rats nest near the church once attended by President Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...It is the indispensable agent and inescapable pain of our lives...
...During contract negotiations, they seek higher staffing levels...
...Read the regulations—but who can find, read, and comprehend all the incomprehensible regulations prepared by lawyers expert at obfuscation?—and the short-term lure can translate into a long-term cost...
...A basic principle of bureaucracy is, follow a rule known only to you...
...I have mentioned the heavy weight of bureaucracy that burdens the whole system...
...Frustrations of this order are the hair shirt of life, worn in all nations and economies— agrarian or industrial...
...The government cares not a whit for character...
...Visa provides an astonishingly efficient global service that handles card thefts and wrong charges expeditiously...
...The District is poorer, larger, more complex (in effect, a state, county, and city), and, beholden to Congress for an appropriation in lieu of the property taxes that federal agencies do not pay, less able to govern itself...
...They use the most convenient, direct, and expensive flights...
...Derelict institutions can be rehabilitated...
...Unworthy of Satan's attention, their computerized torments are inflicted randomly by incompetent programmers...
...Billed $16.10 for a twenty-minute evening phone call to the Bronx, I protested to Sprint Customer Service and asked for an explanation...
...I repay excessive solicitations by posting empty prepaid envelopes and letting the subscription lapse for a period, renewing later at the reduced rate offered to new subscribers...
...Some are solicitous, most are conscientious...
...Pro bono lawyers, small claims courts, and volunteers for religious, health, and social agencies help the poor, incompetent, and elderly meet their obligations to, and obtain their rights from intransigent bureaucracies...
...staff are qualified and content...
...Under present labor law, the legitimacy of a union's negotiating staff levels can be appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, which is more likely while under Republican than Democratic control to side with employers...
...At present, these agencies are plainly, painfully inadequate...
...Your call is important to us...
...gang gunfire kills targeted victims and bystanders alike...
...During one protracted winter outage, we had to abandon our heatless home, spend two nights in a motel, and then restock the fridge...
...Electricity, supplied by Pepco (Potomac Electric Power Company), is unreliable...
...Money helps you use your time as you like, not as bureaucracies dictate...
...and "access [to] other health resources on-line at www.fepblue.org ." The nation has more incomprehensible languages than New Guinea, and the number of translators available when needed rarely meets the demand...
...Power lines run through trees that bow and break in every storm...
...I once clipped half a dozen address labels from duplicative catalogs and sent them to the business manager of a leading press, whom I had met, hoping to reduce our volume of waste and save her some postage...
...The licensing of doctors, nurses, physical therapists, dentists, dental hygienists, social workers, and other health professionals takes at most two weeks in Maryland and Virginia...
...I wrote and got no response...
...acts, like Tolstoy's Napoleon, in ignorance it mistakes for knowledge) is the scorn of "distant bureaucrats...
...she favors a new system with a single or consolidated payer...
...After forty minutes, I reached a nurse who advised that my sister stop the antibiotic, which, of course, she had already done...
...Why, having never chosen the profession, must we become accountants every spring...
...Friends wrinkle and wilt...
...they require close scrutiny, public disclosure, and all possible (formal and informal, political and civic) correction...
...Commission on Civil Rights, and editor of the Independent Scholar...
...The answer or, rather, answers to the first question are relatively easy and, for the most part, the same answers seem applicable to both private and public organizations...
...No institution is permanently secure and stable...
...Two winters ago, some areas went without power for more than a week...
...low interest loans, banks, and Visa cards...
...the insults and dangers with which they punish individuals and communities should not be ignored...
...Three times in two years I have had to change a card number that an unknown villain had acquired and DISSENT / Summer 2001 67 ENDURING BUREAUCRACY misused...
...To what extent are they...
...Is her character, not the IRS, to blame...
...Mostly Public Bureaucracies Income tax is the bane of all government haters, and you need not hate the government to hate the tax preparation process...
...Being so common, so much a part of everyday life, they seldom become political issues...
...In a good bureaucracy, tasks are commensurate with human, financial, and technical resources...
...I never spoke to a doctor...
...A degree of economy and efficiency may be sacrificed for a gain in courtesy and reliability...
...Some institutions help many in their orbit: for example, law students give legal help to other students and poor area residents...
...They get exercised about global warming, affirmative action, elections, Israeli or Russian affairs, but regard the crimes and misdemeanors of bureaucracy as inescapable facts of life, like sparrows and weather...
...They—we—tire, sigh, and creak, visit doctors, take pills, write wills, have operations, and, freed at last of doctors and taxes, expire...
...IHAD AN excruciating encounter with one automated medical answering "service...
...Fathom, Columbia University's new Internet venture, which invites public inquiries about the "authenticated knowledge" it promises to deliver to "a worldwide audience," has not replied to a simple question...
...managers resist, charge "featherbedding," and claim that staffing is a management prerogative...
...The flow of catalogs continued unabated...
...A few examples illustrate the point...
...Relations between residents and police are often tense...
...in D.C., from one to nine months...
...But most of our lives consist of little things...
...some travel in private chartered planes and yachts...
...Read the small print and the bargain is less attractive...
...and, on the back side, "Important Information About Your Medicare Part B Medical Insurance Benefits...
...Or will we retain what we increasingly have today: two levels of service, first class for the well-to-do and coach (it can become steerage) for the rest...
...I was once staff to a panel of prominent citizens that evaluated postal services...
...We are better off with incompetent than efficient tyrants and thieves...
...Accounts of overbooking...
...The Internal Revenue Service is a cross under which she staggers half the year...
...Phone charges, and the company's explanation of them, are mystifying...
...police and health officers, developers, real estate executives—to discuss common concerns...
...leave first and are met and driven or helicoptered to their destination...
...A wealthy couple need not wait on an actual or telephone queue...
...If similar conditions produce similar effects in most organizations, hapless citizens will encounter similar aggravations wherever they turn...
...Gridlock, usually obtains an answer and remedial action from a responsible official...
...Too many new programs, products, and services receive undue promotion and insufficient careful implementation and maintenance...
...The Post would perform a public service by adding similar columns on government agencies and private businesses...
...Enmeshed in bureaucratic webs, consumers need recourse to effective, independent agents and agencies: to inspectors, ombudsmen, consumer protection offices, legal aid, small and large claims courts...
...the lower classes, an occasional pawnbroker and bonder...
...its ills and aggravations are as rife in private as in governmental affairs...
...I recently received a bill for a procedure that was performed two years ago and returned it because of several obvious errors...
...An attempt to do so can generate so many additional aggravations that you are better off trying to forget the one you have...
...UC had a record of issuing it but not of its being cancelled: a glaring invitation to fraud...
...My wife and I are in tolerable health and are not hypochondriacs...
...Friends with whom I discuss them quickly lose interest...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 • 6q...
...Among the good reasons to be rich are the special service and attention you can get, the queues and bottlenecks you can avoid...
...Nearby bureaucrats are not more admired...
...The malfunctions of bureaucracies are symptoms of social malfunctions, sometimes local, sometimes national...
...When the agency director ignored a summons to appear in District court, she was arrested, handcuffed, and brought before the judge...
...You can spend inordinate time learning the answers or simply accept the charges, like traffic jams, television ads, background "music," and noisy lawnmowers, as a cost of modern living...
...Schools of engineering, business, and policy prosper...
...and they get personal satisfaction (perhaps also recognition and reward) from doing them well...
...Postindustrial bureaucracy is no more responsive than industrial bureaucracy...
...He did not reply...
...To be put on perpetual hold and force-fed music is inhumane...
...In the latter, "human contact occurs .. . 'please' and 'thank you' are said, and postal business is conducted in a friendly manner...
...An experienced postal clerk, telephone operator, or nurse can negotiate obstacles that helpless novices confront with the postal service, phone company, or hospital...
...managers and staff respect and may even like one another...
...There is no danger of America's approaching that condition...
...The United States spends vast sums on medical research, education, and care...
...otherwise, it changes nothing and yields nothing or, at most, an automated reply...
...IN THE 1960S, my wife worked in a California state agency and at the University of California, San Francisco...
...Reviewing what money can and cannot buy is one way to assess what might be done to remedy the insults of bureaucracy...
...A conscientious, church-going acquaintance is distressed by the competitive practices of charitable agencies, convinced that their failure to limit solicitations and to cooperate with one another will ultimately damage their causes...
...Why hadn't she told me that...
...it may be more insufferable because more automated...
...My prize example of good, indeed generous, customer service involves Sears...
...THE IDEA OF a nation whose institutions— large and small, national and local, governmental, business, political, religious, cultural, educational, scientific, and charitable—all have competent and contented personnel, function smoothly, and meet current and long-term obligations well is utopian...
...The potentates responsible for this postindustrial monstrosity have places reserved for them in Satan's infernal queue...
...At every point, decision, uncertain decision based on unclear rules, inadequate information, and ignorance...
...The quality of medical knowledge, facilities, drugs, and physicians are not major political issues...
...Having cited impenetrable bureaucracies that disregard complaints, I should here note that others handle them admirably...
...given a set of inapplicable choices, I feel that a door has been slammed in my face...
...Experienced county staff, she says, know one another and think of themselves as part of a well-run government...
...Bound together with unburnable paper chains, they shuffle along, hopeless, exhausted, in an endless, hell-girdling queue with neither head nor tail...
...Earlier, I noted the sorry state of the District of Columbia...
...Health worries are an unhappy fact of age...
...Alexander Bell's wondrous invention has become an affliction that rings when you want silence and emits a busy signal or recorded message when you want to talk to someone...
...and yet again...
...Billing and rebilling...
...autocratic or democratic...
...Decades ago, while my former wife was on another floor giving birth to our second son, I was detained in the hospital lobby supplying financial particulars so that if we both died upon seeing the bill, the hospital would be paid by our heirs...
...How do careless people who keep few receipts manage...
...they give it a perceptible flavor, imperceptibly shape it, and can enhance or destroy it ("For want of a nail...
...Such issues as school and construction schedules or bus routes and police patrols may thus be resolved...
...The political and economic climate visibly affects the quality of services and such tiresome matters as queues, busy phone signals, and unanswered complaints...
...Its symptoms reflect the size of an organization, the workload of frontline clerks, the difficulty of monitoring (let alone changing) their conduct, the greater devotion to profit than to customer satisfaction, the emphasis on gross quantifiable measures of performance...
...The ills of public agencies must be taken seriously by voters and taxpayers as well as by legislators and civil servants...
...Thick piles of blue and black notices from BlueCross/BlueShield and Medicare, plus hospital and doctors' bills, and checks for overpayment have reduced me to total ignorance of what I owe and am owed...
...Then I remembered the blessed Post ombudsman...
...The Washington Post runs an excellent column of complaints and queries on road repairs, signs, lights, and traffic impediments...
...and don't say what it is...
...If ill-spirited employees, rapacious owners and executives, and short-sighted supervisors and technicians are entrenched in and around national and local institutions, the best measures to improve them will have only shortterm effects...
...Anarchists' hostility to government exceeds that of conservatives: as George Woodcock puts it in Anarchism, "government must die before freedom can live...
...The panel concluded that discourtesy is more common in big than small post offices...
...Do I have to change my insurance, credit card, and bank every month...
...We hired a lawyer...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
