I know the feeling
It is the real thing
The essence of the soul
The perfect moment
That golden moment
I know you feel it too
I know the feeling
It is the real thing
You can't refuse the embrace
No?
Sometimes we face the things we most dislike. A phobia or fear that must be confronted so it doesn’t limit out lives. For me it’s dealing with bureaucracy - waste and pointless processes do my head in. They drive me from being a fairly amiable chap to something altogether angrier.
It could be a bank, a telco, an insurance company, or let’s face it - a government department. There are processes to be followed which look less like attempts to capture edge cases of authentication than lazy ass covering - and it drives me mental.
Once in a while the person administering said Kafkaesque nightmare will acknowledge the process is nonsense, that they’re only doing their job, but that just drives me crazier. “I was only following orders” wasn’t considered a good enough excuse in 1945 and I don’t see why we should start now.
In my view the bureaucracy isn’t the problem, the people administering it are.
Readers might recall that my son Alex, who lives in Melbourne, got engaged recently. I’m keen to go and spend time with him and his bride to be - can’t wait. The thing is my passport has expired and with Covid I never bothered to renew it. Now I hear reports on the radio that the processing time for passports is at eight weeks - yikes.
So I got my passport photo done down at the chemist, and asked a neighbour to act as a referee for my identity. The rest of the requirements seemed easy enough, sure there would be a long processing time but at least the application looked easy. I already had a RealMe account, what could possibly go wrong?
Despite not having used it for years I remembered my RealMe credentials - sweet. But what was this? A message saying that my user name and password weren’t enough to login?
Ugh, really? I tried pressing the button which suggested it would return me to the service I was trying to access, but that simply returned me to the login screen. Bugger. I guess a phone call it was.
It was a bit before 9am so I doubted anyone would be answering the phones but my call went through to a queue so figured I might as well wait, surely it wouldn’t be long?
It wasn’t. Within a minute it sounded like the phone had been picked up by someone but before I could speak it was hung up. I tried the same thing three times, each with the same result. I guesses that they didn’t allow people to join the virtual queue outside of working hours, which seemed pointless but at least everyone was in the same boat.
After 9am I rang again and went back into the same queue, but this time nobody answered. Ten minutes went by, twenty, thirty, nothing. No indication of how many other people were waiting or what the likely wait time was going to be. Just a message that they were experiencing heavy loads - which I imagine is permanent, rather than an occasional occurrence.
An hour went by - nothing at all. An hour and a half, nada. Two hours, absolutely no indication that my call would ever be answered. I wondered about the fact that they hadn’t let me join a queue prior to 9am. How was it possible that so many people were waiting for us to be here for two hours? Did we all arrive en masse at 9:01am?
Maybe there was only one person answering calls for the whole country? What if they had Covid? Maybe no one was ever going to answer?
I began to wonder whether this was all a new initiative from the government, freaked out by the number of Kiwis leaving the country since they came to power.
People always leave but the current rate of departure is hardly an endorsement of the coalition’s policies for dealing with the cost of living or crime, which have thus far failed to improve either. Had Nicola or Christopher simply directed government departments to stop processing requests that might result in Kiwis leaving?
Or was this the result of government cuts to public services? Get rid of those people answering the phones - it’s not like people can take their business elsewhere. Provide a terrible customer experience and maybe people will just get sick of waiting and stay in NZ after all?
Probably not, let’s be honest hour long phone queues, hard to navigate, supposedly self service websites, and what often appears to be pointless bureaucracy for the sake of it, is nothing new. Although clearly cutting funding of those services to the bone is not going to improve things.
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