What's the most frustrating, soul-destroying bureacratic process?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What’s the most frustrating, soul-destroying admin or bureaucratic process than most of us face at some time or other?

Transferring bank accounts? Moving data from your old computer to your new one? Trying to get a credit card company to understand that your payment was on time? Trying to set up a new function on your smart phone? Trying to complete all the forms to get enrolled somewhere? Trying to cancel a cell phone contract?

I’ve recently been through several experiences of jumping through endless administrative and bureacratic hoops just to get (you would think) simple things done, and I’m wondering what is the worst of all? At the moment, I’d give the prize to: trying to get a Paypal account verified, when all of their own verification procedures simply don’t work.

Anyone else want to suggest the worst one of all?

2

I’d say applying for disability. I’ve never done it, but I know people who have. The majority of adults are automatically denied, and have to hire a lawyer and go to court. Sounds pretty awful to me.

3

Applying for Social Security Disability Benefits. I’ve never had to, knock on wood, but I walked a friend through the process and it was absolutely the most soul-sucking, humanity-crushing, desperation-producing experience of my life. and I had no stake in the matter! She, meantime, was trying to get the help she needed to you know, eat and stuff.

Really extremely horrible.

4

Closing off the accounts of someone who has died. Not only are you not in the mood but several people will insist they have to speak to whoever’s name is on the account. Your assurances that this is unlikely, since they’re dead, will not move them. They will insist.

By the third or fourth account you ought to be in the second circle of hell. “Yeah, it’s a good long distance plan, but it doesn’t reach to the other side! She’s dead already.”

You will finish your day with, “No problem, I’ll have her call you, straight away!”, I promise.

5

Closing on a house.

“Sign this.”
“Now here”.
“Here.”
“Now here and here.”
“Initials only here.”

6

My most annoying personal experiance with this involved getting a permit to put up a fence.

Go for the permit - they tell me I need a land survey
Get the survey - they tell me I need a variance
Try to get the variance - neighbors object to style of fence
Upgrade fence material - neighbors object to placement of fence
Send inquiry to neighbors about rectally inserted fencing - abandon project.

7

I’ve heard Hell was paradise compared to trying to cancel an AOL account. I’m not sure if it’s still that difficult.

My bureaucratic nightmare always seems to involve the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration.

If your insurance lapses for a day and even if you can prove you didn’t drive your car, you are flagged and fined.

If you’re late on parking tickets, you are flagged and fined.

If you get too many flags, you are flagged and fined.

If you’re late on a parking ticket in Washington, DC, you are flagged, fined, and your license was suspended. I was surprised when I was nearly arrested once for driving on a license that was suspended two years prior. I almost never get pulled over, so I had no idea.

The reason for the suspension? I had a parking ticket in DC which I was late on, so the DC DMV notified the MD MVA, and my license was suspended. Come to find out that when I did pay the ticket, the DC DMV doesn’t automatically notify the MD MVA to remove the suspension! I called and had to go down to DC get proof of payment. I turned it in to the MD MVA, but it wasn’t good enough… I needed a notarized copy of my payment. Fed up, in a superhuman feat, I finally managed to get the MD bureaucrat to call the DC bureaucrat and get it cleared up. I then had to go to court on the suspended license charge to argue that my license shouldn’t have been suspended in the first place. Fortunately, the judge agreed.

Should I have paid the parking ticket on time? Sure, and I would have had I known what a late payment would have in store for me.

8

Applying for residency in the Czech Republic… a 10 month process. Conversely, the same process in the UAE took 48 hours.

In part because we were told in Prague that we’d need a certified police report from Dubai. So we flew from Prague to Dubai ($600ea), got the report (2 days), took it to Abu Dhabi and got it notarized at the Czech Embassy (full day), back to Dubai to have it notarized at the Foreign Ministry. Then flew back to Prague with a very impressive looking piece of paper.

So when we turned in this oh-so-important paper, they said we really didn’t need it. Morons.

9

I was pickpocketed in Sofia, Bulgaria one time. It wouldn’t have been a huge deal except that my wallet contained my litchna karta, my national ID card, which I was legally required to carry at all times. (Not because I was a foreigner, Bulgarians have to too.)

The whole process of reporting it stolen was totally soul-destroying. First of all, it turns out that each part of Sofia has its own police station and you can’t go to another one, you have to go to the one in the district in which the crime was committed. I was pickpocketed (or so I think) right at the point where six districts come together. So figuring out which police station to go to was a hassle.

When we got there, I waited for FOUR HOURS to see someone. (This was apparently nothing - everyone told me later they took pity on me because I was a foreigner.) I finally got to talk to a policewoman. I told her the whole, unexciting story of how I got to my destination and realized my wallet was gone. (Her question: “did you see any gypsies around?”) She typed up my story, printed it out, and THEN MADE ME HAND COPY IT ONTO A PIECE OF PAPER.

I was like, “how about you print out TWO copies and we can tape the second one to this piece of paper!” and she was all “NO. YOU MUST WRITE IT BY HAND.”

So I sat in this little room for an hour and recopied the whole goddamn thing in my shitty Bulgarian handwriting. Then I got a bunch of paperwork saying that my litchna karta was legitimately missing and I couldn’t be arrested for wandering around without an ID. Also, this would start the process of my getting a new litchna karta - which was stupid because I was leaving the country in three weeks and it takes a month to get a litchna karta. (Also a fairly soul-destroying process.)

The next day, someone actually found my wallet and returned it to the police (sans money, of course, but my credit card and debit card were fine and unused). So the whole thing ended up being for naught - except that they turned it into a different police station and I had to fill out a zillion more forms saying that my wallet had, in fact, been returned to me.

I had to miss a whole day of school because of this nonsense - the business with the police took so long that I missed the last bus to my village and had to stay in Sofia overnight. I hadn’t been planning on it, so I didn’t have a change of clothes or my toothbrush or anything.

10

Immigration, in general. Going to Lunar House in London was the most soul-crushing experience of my life, by far.

It starts right from getting off the Tube. The place is in an area which has little but anonymous offices as far as the eye can see. There seem to be no restaurants or pubs, just plain blocks of offices which no signage other than tiny nameplates. Everything is under construction, and you have to duck under scaffolding to walk down the street. Fortunately, nobody else is around, because it’s 5 am.

Yes, it’s 5 am. If you want to get anything done at Lunar House, you have to get there at 5 am. I got there at 7 am once. The queue had already been shut. Already, by 7 am, enough people had shown up that Immigration Services knew they could not handle them all in eight hours. Everyone who showed up afterward was told to go home. I was lucky, I’d only come in from Oxford. One poor soul came from Manchester, sent on a trip to nowhere. We all pitched in for enough for him to stay in a local hostel, and I gave him my lunch. I was going back home anyway.

So after waiting until 9 am, you get in. Maybe. The place goes from everyone waiting in a queue to chaos. Nobody knows what is happening, or where to go. All announcements are in English, which maybe half of the attendees can’t understand. The other half can’t understand either, because the announcements come in over a scratchy PA system worse than the Tube’s. There is a mad rush. Inevitably someone drops all their important papers and has to pick them up, blocking everyone else.

After the waiting, comes the wait. You get a number and wait your turn. Look around the room and you can see all the stages of grief. Some people are sitting and weeping: these are the people who know they will be rejected and are waiting for the hammer to drop. Others sit tense and near anger. Still others grip their papers with a sense of fear. But most sit blank and staring, helpless to their fate. The walls are a pale, sickly blue. The hours pass with nothing to do but watch the digital number tick slowly on. There is no reading material available, no TV to watch, absolutely nothing if you didn’t plan ahead, and most people didn’t. Isn’t this a first-world country? Can’t anything get done in a reasonable manner?

Finally your number is called. Even if you are prepared, they are not. The last time I went to Lunar House, I was given the standard greeting: “Passport, please.” I am here to get my passport back. You have it. The bureaucrat looked at me as if I had told her there was no moon. She looked at the computer again, and frowned. The keyboard received a few jabs. Another frown. She walked away from her desk. Five minutes later she returned with the passport. She slid it through the window without a word.

“What was the result of my appeal?” Another frown, followed by a headshake. My time in the UK was over.

On my way out of Lunar House, I ran into a man, probably from India or Pakistan. His eyes were bloodshot and he was making a brave attempt not to cry. He looked over at me. “Me neither, mate,” I told him. “Good luck.”

The sky grew grey and cold over Lunar House.

11

The death of a close loved one.

Hospital bills. Mortuary salesmen. Organizing funerals. Wills. Lawyers. Notifying. Closing bank accounts. Selling a house.

Etc
Etc
Etc

12

Dealing with immigration authorities. The day I got US citizenship is on record in my memory as one of the most “thank f–cking gods I never have to deal with them again!”

Oh…except then I looked down and saw that they’d misspelled my name on the citizenship certificate. :smack:

13

Okay, I take my story back. It was a walk in the park compared to your stories.

14

How about what I’m currently being subjected to? Securing an academic job in Italy. All job applications have to go directly through the Ministry of Education in Rome. I’ve had to fill in dozens of separate forms and send them by courier (no normal postage allowed) to Italy. These forms want lists of publications, but not just once, but duplicated over many pages. Signatures have to be placed randomly throughout the documents. Despite being an EU funded job, all forms are only available in Italian, including my contract (I translated it myself). Despite having the job in theory, the Ministry of Education may not approve my position as I do not have a PhD yet, and have no Masters degree, which is the default in the UK but apparently unusual in Italy. Apparently, I’m a test case.

15

Here’s one: filling out job applications using online HR software.

Is it really necessary for each and every damn company to have a different type of software with a different type of form? One site lets me upload my resume as a Word doc. This other site requires a text-only resume. Oh, and this site requires me to type each job description in its own little box that severely limits the number of characters allowed – and then has the page set to time out just before I finish rewriting the damn thing to have only so many characters and still sound like intelligible English. And who the hell has a major in high school… and why can’t I just leave that field blank??? Then there’s the site that requires my references up front. Really?

Or how about the fields to enter your salary? This one wants my past salary in hourly terms. This other one wants it in yearly terms. The next wants both my starting and final salaries for each and every past position. Hey, you wanna know when I had my last pap smear? Because I could probably dig that up, too. Except the site would probably time out…

My favorite was one that took me over an hour to fill out online. No sooner did I hit Submit when it shot an email to my inbox a microsecond later saying, “Sorry, you’re not qualified sucker, but thanks for trying.” C’mon. Couldn’t you at least pretend that a human being actually looks at these things? Would it kill you to time-delay it for, like, an hour or two just to preserve my human dignity. Yeah… I didn’t think so.

Oh, and I love having to create a new username and password to set up an account for each and every company I apply to. Like so many postings for my particular job specialty come up in your company that I’ll actually need to log in again to apply for something else. :rolleyes:

16

Suing an uncooperative, dishonest party. I had to sue an ex-landlord for a security deposit she stole. First she claimed she didn’t get the court summons (lie, it was slipped right under her door by my neighbor), then when I finally got approval to put a levy on her bank account she had it reversed. When the judge found in my favor she appealed, etc… all in all, tons of forms - multiple trips to the courthouse, and a total process that took about 1.5 years to get my money back. I did get it back, but was out all the court processing fees even though she was technically supposed to pay them. She claimed she was moving out of state and even though I thought she was lying, as that was her nature, I just took what I could get to be done with it.

17

Agent Foxtrot, I have dealt with the Maryland MVA; you are not an unreasonable person.

18

North Carolina’s DMV is pretty weird.

I moved here and needed to swap a California license for an NC license. Should be no problem, you’d think. Take the written test, pay a few bucks, get a new license. No such luck. The name on my CA license did not match the name on my passport, which did not match the name on my lease, which did not match my Social Security card. North Carolina does not willingly accept the possibility that people do not have middle names, so I had to ponder what my original middle name might have been as my SS card only had a middle initial. My CA license and passport have no middle initial.

I don’t use a middle name. I went outside and dialed… “Hi Mom, what’s my middle name?” I went back inside and told the clerk that I called my mother and got my middle name. By this time, I’d been bounced from desk to desk and dealt with so many bureaucrats that I couldn’t see straight. The clerk hands me a name change form, tells me to fill it out and get it notarized.

At least I remembered seeing a branch of the bank I work for on the way to the DMV office. We tend to have notaries public in the branches, so we head there. A little friendly chit-chat and a stamp later, I have my notarized form proclaiming my True Middle Name. I don’t like it.

In hindsight, I should have just filled out the form and said “no middle name” as the notary certainly didn’t care what she was stamping for a fellow employee, and the DMV clerk didn’t look at anything but that form when I went back to their office.

19

Nah, then you’d probably have your name changed to Mr. or Ms. Got Nomiddlename Passwords.

20

At the moment I’m dealing with the government student loan people. Like most medical residents I can’t afford to pay on my student loans right now. I talked to someone about whether I was eligible for the economic hardship deferrment. They asked me a bunch of questions, did the formula and concluded that I was. I sent in the relevant forms and got back a letter saying that I’m not eligible and that my deferrment is denied. So I talked with another phone-help person about a residency forbearance. I sent in the forms with the necessary signatures to say that yes I am a resident in an accredited program. Yesterday I got a denial notice saying they couldn’t process my request because I didn’t send in a certification. Today I got another denial notice saying that my institution isn’t eligible for this forbearance even though I know that other residents here have used this forbearance. I was going to call them again tonight but I don’t think I can handle it today.