I normally consider myself to be rather mild-mannered. I hadn’t been angry in ages, but today, I could feel the ire rise in my gorge like volcanic heartburn after too many bad chimichangas at a Chinese-Mexican restaurant. Not that I would go to such an establishment willingly, but if I had, I’m sure this is what it would feel like. The source of my anger was my home country’s bureaucracy.
Suffice it to say that I had to sit in a waiting room with 50 other “Canadians” who needed to apply or renew plastic cards that feature their names, photos, addresses, and signatures: health cards, drivers’ licenses, license plates, death certificates, birth certificates, and so on. Luckily, ramshackle immigrant food cart permits were issued by another government body.
There were white Canadians there, yes, and there was an assortment of black Africans, Somalis, Sikhs and other South Asians, Arabs, and a few little babies with soothers and perambulating strollers, as well as one rambling fellow who had an undisclosed mental illness.
In the distant past, I thought I might apply for a Master’s in First World War Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. I never did apply, but their instructions on how to apply were amusing and memorable. I also liked some of the things that their information page said about bureaucracy. It was something to the effect that life was less about good and evil and more about paperwork. That line stuck with me. I’m starting to think, however, that when dealing with government bureaucracies, paperwork is actually a low grade of evil.
There was a faux red-velvet rope sectioning off the waiting area for those who had made appointments online. There was a take-a-number ticket dispenser affixed to the wall for the plebs like me who hadn’t had the foresight to make an appointment. In my own defense, I must say that I did indeed try to make an appointment, but they had all been snatched up.
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In order to continue using Canada’s socialized medicine system, which is provincially run and administered, I needed to renew my health card that had expired. I needed to prove that I was indeed me by way of other plastic cards, a passport, and some printed bills.
The faceless, anonymous bureaucracies of the modern world are seemingly the pillars upon which the modern techno-state is built. Will we fall apart without these structures of wires, energy, computers, paper, plastic, and procedure? Maybe. But then again, there is layer upon layer of it. Endless, continent-spanning cubicle farms of lobotomized human servitors cogitating, inputting, sorting, and selecting. Disproportionate to their number are Canada’s citizens. What I mean by this is that Canada, like many semi-Communist Western states, is over-governed. Public service bloat is a tremendous problem.
The lowly clerks who man the front lines in the bureaucracy are usually not the problem at all. It is typically the rank on rank of managers and public executive-level bureaucrats who extract enormous amounts of money and resources because of their salaries, benefits, pensions, and per diems. This is not lost on me.
It is, however, the front line, officious servitor-clerk who can decide to either help or hinder you. During my personal adventure to renew my health card, I was confronted by a woman behind the plexiglass partition who was as ugly as a cave troll, to reference the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and would’ve had her floating mechanical servo-skull extract a blood sample before shipping me off to the Imperial Guard regiment of her choice. This loud-mouthed woman would not budge from protocol, even though I am a citizen and have lived in this country — indeed, in this province — all my life, and merely needed a new piece of digitized plastic to allow me access to our ever-failing, ever-stressed health care system.
I was reminded of the Vogons in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio and book series: bloated, slug-like, spiteful, bureaucratic, and who had “as much sex appeal as a road accident.” I imagined the denizens of the provincial administration as cubicle-shackled Vogons losing my paperwork, finding it, losing it again, burying it under soft peat for three months, recycling it into firelighters, and feeding whatever was left to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
I retreated in frustration.
I successfully repressed the urge to kick an inanimate object as I left the building. Jonathan Bowden said that masculinity is about control, power, and ventilating anger when one needs to do so:
Masculinity is a sacred thing, and yet it’s been demonized and disprivileged in the Western world, regarded as just an excuse for brutality. Masculinity is about self-control. It’s about respect and power that’s ventilated when it’s necessary to use it.
Instead, when I got home I vented my ire by having a caffeinated beverage and going for a five-kilometer walk during which I petted two friendly dogs. Afterwards, I felt much better.
After collecting the supporting documentation at home, I knew I had to go back the following day — something that filled me with dread.
Once again, there were many different types of brown people in the waiting room: South Asians of nebulous origins; some bearded, jihadi-looking fellows; a woman in a hijab with two children; an Asian fellow with unzipped boots, an Eastern European fellow with an accent; and an elderly white grandmother who broke down and cried, which was very sad.
One shorn-headed fellow who was there with his girlfriend kept turning his head to look at me. I pretended not to notice until it happened a fifth time, which was when I decided to glare back at him. He didn’t do it again. The petty politics of the modern Dickensian waiting room are very odd. Most people were transfixed by their smartphones in a vain effort to pass the time. A digital display counted as people were served; on that day, I was number 23.
Finally, after an eternity, my number was shown on the digital display and accompanied by a jarring beep. A voice from around the corner called out, “Number 23!” I bounded out of my chair, file folder in hand, ready to do battle. Fortunately for me, I was met by a pleasant, smiling woman behind the clear plastic barrier who was in her late 50s. After a series of questions and verifications, an exchange of documents, and a verbal attestation to His Majesty The King, she took my photo. She then issued a piece of paper that would act as a temporary health card while I waited three to eight weeks for my new one to arrive in the mail. She completed the transaction politely and efficiently.
When I finally emerged from that den of soul-crushing bureaucratic iniquity, the sparse grass patches interspersed amongst the grey concrete brutalism of the surrounding industrial park were a verdant green. The birds on the chain-link security fence were singing, the Sun was shining brightly, and I knew then that I was alive.
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2 comments
And the Trolls you have to deal with all make around 80K per year, think they’re both overworked, underpaid and totally irreplaceable.
You’re right, Fred. And they’re recession proof: no matter what’s happening in the outside world, the bureaucracy grinds on like some lumbering managerial colossus.
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