alt Hacker News“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally”
As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
Replies
But we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not.
They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.
People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can.
Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.
I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.
You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.
They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.
This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.
This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude