bureaucracies and migraine

radical concept

I warn you this is a rant so if you’re not up for such, you probably should hit delete now. It’s also about one of the purportedly most iconic U.S. private sector employers of the past fifty years but my experience with them is they too have a massive bureaucracy.

My plea is that we stop, I don’t care who we are, blaming federal employees as if things don’t go wrong in the private sector. It’s utter nonsense to argue that feds are all lazy or uninterested or worthless humans. There are screw ups, there is accountability much of the time (I stand by that statement even if the accountability is slow, it does come), but the crux of the problem is not just the people or the regulations as much as layered, competing objectives making the federal system work far less clearly than one might expect or hope. I do not dispute that it definitely leads to disappointment at times. I state those facts with complete and utter confidence.

Again, yes, things that go awry but the overwhelming majority of people paid with the taxpayer’s purse are honest, hardworking, and determined to get things done correctly in the face of multiple, often contradictory direction from us the taxpayers, often via our Congress and Executive officials. We want things that are fundamentally incompatible much of the time. A state-of-the-art fighter for all of the services, built in each of the fifty states, with more gizmos to satisfy each of the service’s individual requirements in less time than budgeted at a cost lowered than the accepted bid is a classic but common problem.

Who sets all of those conditions? Hardly the bureaucracy, my friends. They are a part but only a part. There are countless other hands in that procurement decision. And that is one of millions we expect done on the cheap with the highest non-Chinese tech, coming off the assembly lines about six weeks after the contract is let. Expectations rarely meet realities. Bureaucrats are not intended to stop that but to assure equities are met. The problem is your equities are not necessarily cousin Clod’s.

The private sector also has bureaucrats and they often screw up.

I asked my brother to express some medicine to me, as per my doctor’s instructions, ten days ago. We were traveling but two prescriptions I carefully counted into a bottle simply never arrived. My doctor was concerned my migraine disease would rear its unrelenting head without the medicine for a week so I dutifully sought to address the problem.

My brother is an incredible mensch. We have had our differences over our many years but he is as good as gold about doing something when I really need him. He came to our condominium, confirmed I did not leave the bottle on or under the bed, then set out to get me a week’s worth of medication. He then went to the “gold standard” overnight shipping firm you all have heard of (guaranteed), paid $148 to get this to me by the 9th at the latest, sent me the receipt/tracking information, and went back to his own busy life.

I still, 7 days later, have no package.

I called the aforementioned shippers on the evening of 9 December where the bureaucrats kicked in. No, everyone said, they could not explain why the package had not been delivered nor when they promised it would be. One person whined she could not help me because she was in the United States.

Excellent, not so much. Infuriating a better description.

To say I had sharp words for her understates them but I noted my frustration swere intended for and about the company and their willingness to charge an exorbitant amount (I didn’t even know how bad yet) for a guaranteed delivery while no one could explain to me why this wasn’t happening as guaranteed. Nobody.

I recognized instantly I would not receive my precious medicine before returning home five days later.

I did return Friday, carefully avoiding anything that could trigger migraine (IYKYK what that means). I was remarkably successful but it took a lot of psychic energy I could have been investing in time with my husband or taking photographs or something else. Anyone with this disease will tell you how utterly debilitating an event is so I recognized it was worth my choices. Actions create consequences, after all.

The package never made it but I am home safely. My suitcase was a day late but is now here, too. What about the undelivered medicine? Nope, so the suitcase is better than nothing.

The tracking information indicates that the package has not been scanned (meaning touched) in their facility for 9 days. Cute things these scanners; they record precisely when someone puts that squiggly-liny data into the system.

Zilch. Nada. Rien. Nothin’.

I went to the shipping office this morning for this private enterprise with worldwide span where my brother paid an arm and a leg. The man behind the counter told me he can’t help me, of course, but Customer Service, the same lovely folks who received my opinion a week ago tonight, is where I go as he is not responsible for anything (quote, my friends). I mumbled he was responsible for collecting the fee as I walked out the door but am sure he either ignored or did not hear me.

No, that is the point, he is not responsible in his eyes. No one is ever responsible these days, it seems, but I could not help but think about the common criticisms of federal employees failing someone rather while the for-profit people don’t get the same level of criticism for not coming through.

I called the Customer Service people again this morning. THREE separate people on that call (where is the efficiency I keep hearing lovingly characterizing the private sector?) spoke with me about this, including the seond woman who couldn’t figure why their internal system sent my call to her at all.

The third person acknowledged she has no idea why the package has not been scanned since 7 December. She also said that she can’t help me because my brother mailed it so he needs an account with this huge company to apply for a refund. When I pointed out this sounded pretty bureaucratic (it is as accounting requires evidence of debits and credits, of course), the person couldn’t say another word except to say, natch, she could not help me.

She was being a bureaucrat, of course, like any federal bureaucrat: following the rules provided her as it’s safer, simpler, and often the law set into place by someone else. Yep, so it is.

Bureaucracies everywhere protect something, whether a process, an entitlement, a system, individuals, or someone. They are not self-generating, though they can self-protect, of course. We tend not to rail on about bureaucracies outside of the government but these private sector folks who deny are hardly more likely to take responsibility than in any other place. This habit of iron clad processes without deviation get to issue guidance (pay $148 for a “guaranteed” delivery) based on algorithms or specific texts to read back to the customer are at the heart of the anger about big health care we have focused on for the past fortnight. Bureaucracies (unelected folks in any field to the affected) are making decisions individuals don’t like. Those decisions seem arbitrary, if not pernicious to many. The consumer of the service feels powerless and unsatisfied, often with few options to achieve satisfaction. I am not sure the difference between governmental and private sector systems are really that different.

I was not a happy camper, in other words, but this column is helping me as I figure why I was so upset that no one is responsible.

My brother is being pretty calm about it after he tried so hard to help. We will, of course, do what we need to assure he doesn’t eat the cost but to say I was frustrated so completely understated how used I felt.

The moral here? It’s a huge world with about 8 billion people living to various levels of prosperity, health, education, and competency among a long list of attributes. But, let’s stop this utter nonsense that government is completely ineffectual and more broken than the private companies; it’s demonstrably not the case. Many federal offices have superb response rates to their clientele as do many companies; not private and public sector agencies fail as well. Both private and public sectors have screw ups and successes.

Another myth is that the private sector companies are universally efficient, brilliant, and successful because they are for-profit. Government is not a business but a service for those who pay taxes and live here. It’s never in two and an half centuries been intended to make a profit. No, we Americans don’t like paying taxes but we adore the benefits we get in many, though not all, cases. Government’s neither all loved or abhorred but, as we say in Spanish, una mezcla: a mixture based on public policy interactions. That is how this exquisitely complicated thing called the United States of America runs.

Of course you’ll say that I am giving only a single poor review of a private sector enterprise while others cite millions of government employee or programmatic failures. I am most definitely not advocating failures but am cheering for successes but part of that in this country has also been based on protecting those who cannot protect themselves—which the role of regulation and bureaucracy. Last time e I checked farmers are some of the most protected people in the country but we never think about that, do we?

Again, neither the public nor private side is entirely successful nor entirely failing as the world, whether a public employee or a private sector hire, has countless good people who go out of their way to help and provide solutions to problems. The world also has some scum who don’t do their jobs, some who are incompetent, and malevolent but that is just human behaviour, people.

But I cannot help but find this story so ironic in an era of an emerging Department of Government Efficiency to be too rich for words. Of course I want things running best possible but there are reasons we have protections called bureaucracies as well as reasons they are painful at times.

Something went wrong so I was disappointed. Mercifully, I did not get ill as the doctor feared. But things go wrong in a lots of places every minute, as the huge number of interfaces between this 8 billion folks means a greater risk of a missed interface. Just the exchanges of actions between 350 million creates failures as it similarly generates some terrific wins.

It would be nice to have perfection but we rarely see it. Yet we all demand it (me assuredly included) without acknowledging perfection’s rarity.

Thoughts on efficiencies, bureaucracies, and the like? Please do send them out much as I got a quite thoughtful note yesterday from a subscriber who adamantly did not want term limits in our country except for the White House. I pointed out I wasn’t endorsing term limits but raising questions about processes. The point is that this dialogue about issues great and small is worth our interactions.

Thank you for bearing with my rant today or any day. I welcome your circulation of this column if you find it or any other useful for others. I appreciate each of the readers at any status but particularly those who are subscribers as your financial support advances this work. If you haven’t sent me a mailing address for your thank you, 2025 calendar as an annual paying subscriber, please do so as I want you to start the year with some color!

We were lucky to have rain this morning. It made for a subtle dawn but I was up well before that hour.

Be well and be safe. FIN