When my father died, it was quite simple to get control of a bank account with over $100K in it. Shutting off his DirectTV on the other hand took months. I was sure that my father was the first ever DirectTV customer to have died.
My heart goes out to those who have had to deal with the bureaucracy resulting from the loss of a loved one. It just seems so unfair to have to deal with that kind of frustration on top of everything else.
For me, dealing with any university has generally been the most nightmarish experience, particularly when I returned to school after an unexpected withdrawal. I had to petition the board for a retroactive medical withdrawal, a process that took 9 months and required extensive documentation. Once that withdrawal was processed, I then had to work out the financial aid situation, still ended up paying $4k out of pocket to get back into school.
So yeah, that.
Immigration into the US is awful. Imagine an 18 month visit to the DMV with But with the staff permanently angry and shouting and throwing things. The INS put their finest stars on passport control duty. They put the rest to work processing H1s and green cards.
Imagine waiting three months for an appointment at 8:37am only to find that 450 other people have an appointment at the exact same time and they can only deal with the first 23 - which you don’t find out for five hours.
It’s like dealing with an army of red-faced, angry voice-mail options on a phone call to the bank.
Right along with immigration: international adoption.
We started the process in spring of 2006. We’re probably still two years away from a match. During that time, we’ve submitted our I-600A paperwork with US immigration three times, been fingerprinted by the FBI three times, endured multiple homestudies, written to Congress about the implementation of the Hague Convention…ugh, too much stuff to mention. And maybe the most heartbreaking part, right now, is that our biological kiddo (my wife got pregnant in the middle of all this, it’s an interesting story) is now old enough to ask when her baby sister is coming home. She pretends she’s talking to her on her play phone. She handed her phone to me the other day and said, “It’s baby Rachel’s momma, she says we can come pick her up!”
It’s sweet, but it just kills you at the same time.
I’ve never been through it myself, but I agree with those who say applying for disability benefits. I have first-hand experience with immigration (my fiancé is American and we are going through his spouse visa application process for the UK), and it is extremely tiresome, but from my disabled friends’ experiences, it seems like each step of the process is designed to take away your sense of personhood and humanity. Immigration is annoying, but there’s nothing like “Hey, depressed person, you have to prove what a worthless, helpless drag on society you are in order to pay your rent and eat.”
Getting a mortgage. My first one back in 1993 took months. So many things to attend to, so many fees to pay/argue, so many people not doing their job. Insurance, appraisals, title searches, surveys, real estate agents, underwriters, bank employees. Too damn complicated.
Second would be closing the accounts of a deceased person. Sometimes it’s almost too easy. Sometimes it is way out of proportion to the actual value of the account.
This is an interesting story. What country are you adopting from? My husband and I have considered international adoption and we have been under the impression (from books we have read and such) that one of the advantages is that the waiting period is usually fixed and does not take as long as adopting, say, an infant in the U.S. Right now I think we are planning on adopting through the state foster system, and I’d be curious how that compares, bureaucratically.
ETA: I read the link, and see you are adopting from China. That was specifically mentioned in the books as one of the easiest/most predictable places to adopt from. What a mess! I’m sorry for all your family has been through and hope things get ironed out soon.
According to my parents, getting a green card.
I don’t know how much of this is hyperbole, but they claimed they weren’t allowed to mail anything, but had to deliver everything by hand to the office, which was 4 hours’ drive away. The forms weren’t checked until after they’d been delivered. If there was anything even minorly wrong with the forms, they would get a letter a few weeks later, and would have to start again and resubmit by hand again. Stuff like the size of the face in the photograph being off by 1/16 of an inch, etc.
What? No love for health insurance claims? I donated a kidney to my mother. Was told at the start, all claims will be paid by her insurance, you don’t have to do anything. Ha!
Everything got sent to her insurance, who of course rejected it because it wasnt her. Second step, get it approved, send it through again. Oh wait, you have to have your insurance deny the coverage first. What!? Why!? They’re not supposed to be covering it, they aren’t in any way responsible so of course they’ll turn it down.
Of course there were all kinds of problems with three different insurance companies trying to work together (mother had primary and secondary, both of which were government run!).
Typical of the problems was company A refusing to send necessary paperwork unless it was requested by company B, but company B won’t send a request , I had to do it. Then they’ll only send the paperwork to me, but company A won’t accept it from me, only from company B.
It took me fully a year and a half before i was in the clear (plus about $700 that i ended up having to pay out of pocket, for which “you will be reimbursed”…of course i wasn’t). All in order to help someone else. I would have been happy not doing it in the first place.
And all this was possible only because my girlfriend worked in medical billing so she knew all the tricks. Otherwise i’m pretty sure i would have ended up paying the entire $30,000 myself and be happy they let me go without giving up the other kidney as future collateral or something.
Hate to continue the hijack, but: China used to be the easiest and fastest. They were among the first to develop an international adoption program, so they had a well-established history. Kids were abundant and pretty well universally healthy. Several adoption agencies worked exclusively with Chinese adoptions, keeping offices in Guangzhou to facilitate the process. When we entered the program, the wait time from “log in date” (the day your dossier information was entered into the computer at the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs) to child match was 9-12 months.
Since then, a number of things have happened, and matching has slowed way, way down; between February and April of 2007, for some reason the CCAA went from matching 13-19 days’ worth of dossiers every month to only a handful. These days they match roughly 2-5 days’ worth of backlogged dossiers every month; it took them around 11 months just to get through March of 2006! The last batch was received on April 5th, which took 35 days for them to match, and matched the dossiers that were received from April 13th to April 17th of 2006. Since our LID is at the end of October, 2006, at this rate it’ll take three years for them to match another 6 months of dossiers and reach ours. That’ll mean at least two more rounds of USCIS paperwork, fingerprints, and homestudies before we get a match, and then we have to apply for visas and set up travel.
The reasons for the slowdown are myriad, murky, and mysterious, and no one’s sure of the truth. Some say that the CCAA is overworked and understaffed. Some say that China has slowed down international adoptions in order to encourage domestic adoption, since they’ve recognized that the one-child policy has created a gender imbalance that needs correction. Some say that there just aren’t as many orphans available, while others claim that the orphanages aren’t making as many kids available for adoption. Whatever the reason, if the books you read are from 2007-2008 or earlier, yeah, they’re out of date with the situation as it sits now.
So, end hijack; if someone wants more information, we should probably start another thread.
#1: Filling out a FAFSA form on-line for my kids. 99 pages of screens, most almost identical to the ones from the year before, made doubly frustrating for the first kid because I knew we weren’t going to get any money, but had to fill out the damn forms anyhow.
#2: Opening a bank account in California. You just want to put money into the damn bank, but because of regulations no doubt for money launderers they treat you like you are a Mexican drug lord or worse. No wonder the savings rate is so low. When I was a kid I went down to the bank with my mom and opened an account with no hassle. Today a kid has to fill out information about his last ten employers.
#3. Mortgage application, but only because of its length. With the amount of equity we still have in our house, and our credit rating, the process was much more enjoyable given that the bank people kept kissing our feet.
I had to go to the DMV to get my license renewed, get an eye test, and get a new picture, but that was a snap.
However, when I was in Bell Labs I knew lots of people in the middle of the green card process, and that is worse than anything I’ve mentioned here.
University registration and financial aid (University of Washington can rot in the deepest leech-infested hell).
Every dept and sub-dept are rigidly segregated and do not communicate directly with each other. Most are staffed with part-time or student help, who are not authorized to make any decisions outside the norm. “Oh, you need our supervisor Sheila, she’s out on leave for two weeks”
In my case, a database field somewhere said that I had received a financial aid check for $8000 when I had not, I had only applied but had never been approved. This was the beginning of my junior year. Every quarter onward I would receive a denial of registration due to incomplete processing (whatever that means) and have to hoof it to 3 different offices and find the requisite supervisor that could sign an exception form and correct the database error to clear the financial aid obligation.
Every quarter the pesky electrons in the database would wake up and reset the database field, and I’d repeat the process. Some quarters it took me halfway through the term before I could get fully registered.
Hey, at least I was progressing–until graduation time. The graduation office is, of course, separate and segregated and would not honor my prior two-years of previous exemptions, signatures, and 8x10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…
Graduation denied, you owe $8000 before we can award a diploma. So I traveled home, and for the next year and a half corresponded via certified letter, ultimately by lawyer, to try and get my damn diploma. I would get an “it’s fixed, everything’s ok” letter from one department, only to have the database flip again by the time the graduation office reviewed, who would then send out an automatic denial letter.
Finally, I took a couple days off work and drove the 4 hours to Seattle determined to handcuff myself to someone’s chair. I would not leave without my diploma. The first desk I arrived at in the graduation affairs office had a new freshman student helper, a little cutie clad in her newest Husky regalia. The supervisor was, of course, not in today (oh no…not again), but when showed my stack of previously signed papers the student said “Cool beans!”, went to her supervisor’s file cabinet, pulled out my diploma, and handed it over.
Here’s to you, cute naive empowered free-thinking Husky girl. 
I then went to registration, showed them my diploma, and they immediately updated my graduated(?) entry from “no” to “yes”.
My dad retired in Brazil in 2004. He put his paperwork for the INSS (their version of Social Security) in 2003. He still hasn’t gotten any money. He filed suit two or three years ago, and the case is working its way through the courts. Luckily, he and my mom have pensions through work and get by without the money. From what I understand, the system there often screws people like this. I feel sorry for people who don’t have other sources of money who need it to live.
To begin with, there is income tax–every year my wife and I fill out five forms; one each for Canada, one each for Quebec and one US (on which I never owe tax, but am required to fill out anyway). But Getting Canadian citizenship was no prize either. We put it off for forty years because, well at first it would have meant giving up filing US tax returns, which I certainly didn’t want to do, and then after that changed, well, there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. (Immigrating here in 1968 was trivial–and free–but I gather it has become much harder and expensive, $1500 in 1995, probably more today.)
But they gave us reason to apply. We now had to carry Permanent Residence cards in order to cross the border. (Curiously, there is supposedly an exception for people who cross by private car, but the border guards say that might be what the official web site says, but they go by different rules and there are no exceptions.) We got them, but then they expired. A year before they expired, we applied. Actually 13 months before. It turns out the average wait is 18 months. It took them five months to even open the envelopes and send acknowledgment. Until then, the web site tells you you have no application. Then we were told to report for an examination. But being over 55, we were exempt from the exam. Report anyway. A very pleasant man interviewed us at some length, but he made it clear that he was just passing the time until the people who were actually taking the exam were finished and ready for their interviews. So we were approved. Many months later we received on December 22 an order to report for swearing in on Jan. 19. Except we had already made arrangements to visit our daughter in mid-Jan. The instructions were to explain immediately if we couldn’t make that date. So I sent a registered letter explaining. In March I called and the person (or robot) I talked to claimed that the entire citizenship process would have be redone and it would take at least six more months. It didn’t. Last April we got a letter asking us to report in May to a swearing in and did. It was in a gym not to far away and, on account of reverb, I didn’t understand a word of what was said. But I got the precious card.
Buying a house was definitely the most soul crushing experience I’ve had to date. If you’re a first time home buyer, it doesn’t matter that you’ve saved up a huge down payment. How dare you expect a bank to finance you when you’ve never owned a home before! You say you have excellent credit? Well, you’re still a credit risk. I actually had to report the first mortgage broker we used to the Board of Real Estate as he was so crooked, I don’t know how he could stand up straight.
Then there is the ‘slush fund’ problem. You have to keep a few thousand dollars handy for the endless inspectors that need to come by to check every aspect of the house, many of whom seem to only drive by your house to do the inspection, and yet they still cost $500 each. Oh, and there is ALWAYS a problem, and is it guaranteed to be complex and require lots of permits and standing in line to fix. Because, you know, you are the first person in the history of humanity to ever buy a house, so naturally this is the only way to handle this.
While I’m bitching, I’d like to throw out weddings as well. Why the hell does the job of ‘wedding coordinator’ even exist? Because even though the flower, cake, and decoration people have done 50,000 wedding before yours, if someone doesn’t hold their hand through the entire process, your flowers will be dead, the photographer will go to the wrong hotel, and cake will be invested with vermin and the caterers will poison the food. Are these people really that retarded?
Trying to find your first paychecks as a new Department of State employee. You can travel over all of WDC and most of Virginia trying to track it down, if you allow the so-called “employees” to have their way. Not one of them will lift a fucking finger to help you, but will gladly send you across the river to another DOS Annex to beg for help. These had to be the laziest, most overpaid, worthless government employees I ever ran across in 40 years of working for and with the USG. People new to the government way of doing things would jump through their hoops. I stood my ground when the first person said “oh, you need to go check over at SA (state annex) 7 in Rosslyn.” My response: “Please pick up the phone and call them and find out if it’s there. I have better things to do with my time.” Man, I got some evil looks from a lot of people. Demanding service from people who are hired to provide it: what a concept.
Second most soul-crushing thing: any other interaction with WDC bureaucrats.
Does my job count? Because we are a Big-4 audit form, it takes weeks of filling out a dozen different conflicts, compliance and independence forms and databases. To put it in perspective, I worked on one project that was budgeted for 30 hours of actual work. It took 3 months to get all the approvals and sign-offs so my team could actually bill their time and expenses.
I often walk around the floor seeing what Dilbert comics the staff has found relating to an actual event in the office and trying to figure out which of us are the PHB.
Years ago, I had a Sprint cellphone. Had it for a year or two, no issues. One day, I can’t make calls. I play with the phone, nothing. Can’t call out, can’t call in. I call Sprint support. They’re…odd on the phone, and they tell me, ahem, that I must come in to the “nearest retail store”. At the time, Sprint was weirdly isolated. Quite literally, the nearest Sprint store was ONE HOUR away. Yes, they’re everywhere now, but this was Connecticut, circa…mid-late-90s. I told them how ridiculous that was – asked them why they couldnt fix it remotely, since it wasnt a hardware issue. Stonewall. I finally got so angry I had to stop the call. I cooled down, called them back the next day. Got the same run around, and again, no, your phones fine, you must come down to the retail store to restore service. This sounds silly now, but this was among the jmost frustrated I’ve ever been; the capper was the way the guy on the phone was completely…disregarding my obvious distress. Finally, I said, look, I’m cancelling my service. Enough is enough. I get sent through a few levels of escalation, finally get Customer Retention. This dear woman finally tells me whats up: for whatever reason, my account had been flagged as either theft-related or scammer. I was only about 17, and I’d never done anything but pay my bill; she fixed the problem immediately and gave me some free service for my trouble. Years later, I’d end up working for Sprint, and let me tell you – I never treated anyone that badly. Even actual scammers.
So I vote for being mistaken for a thief by a cellphone company.
<Booop-booop!>
Damn, I need a better textual signifier of my “busted police siren” noise.
My most troubling one, surprisingly, was my SO giving me his old car - not charging me anything. It took me 13 trips to the DMV, I kid you not. I think they dock their pay or something if I accomplish everything I need in one go.
My sister complains about getting her husband into this country. She says they said things like, “You had a tiny wedding. We know Hindus have huge weddings. We know it’s not a real marriage.” She was 48! People often don’t do big weddings at that age.