Next!!!

Bureaucrats are one of the things that make American life purgatorial.  But small-town bureaucrats are a special case that is worth discussing because of their emergent characteristics.  When I was young and living in New York City, one of the most horrific ordeals that the city could dish out was a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.  The DMV was located in a large old building and there would be many, many lines of New Yorkers waiting to get their business attended to.  Maybe your license was about to expire and you had to pay the fee or get your picture taken or take the eye test or, God forbid, you needed to correct a mistake on the document.  You would wait in one of these lines and hope against hope for quick service.  Eventually, this hope would cruelly die in that first line.  The glacial pace of the line would sooner or later crush your spirit and you took on the same weary, miserable expression of everyone else around you.  And even before you reached the front of the line you would have already sized up the essential traits of the clerk waiting on your line.  She (it was always a woman) had a face that could stop a clock and her IQ probably hovered around 75 and she worked and talked so slowly that you weren’t sure from moment to moment whether she had lapsed into a coma.  But regardless of her demeanor and obvious imbecility the only thing you knew going in was that she would declare your problem didn’t fit her services ands she would redirect you to the back of some other line.  And this same process might be repeated several times until finally you might just flee the building rather than risk arrest for assaulting a public servant.

But small towns do not possess this kind of apparatus.  Even at tax time they do not possess the vast numbers of citizens needed to turn lines into killing fields.  They just don’t.  But what the bureaucracy of a small town does possess in spades is kooks.  Once again, they’re all women (well not the road department but they’re not really bureaucrats) and they often have faces that could stop clocks but their scope of influence is limited.  There just aren’t enough people in town hall to endlessly stall a tax payer from receiving some government service.  So instead of delay they’ve developed the art of obfuscation to a high art form.  I was talking to the assistant town clerk of Dunwich and wanted to clear up a problem having to do with the misspelling of a road name.  And it was complicated.  Both names that were listed in various state databases were incorrect but I wanted to determine who had jurisdiction over what the correct name actually was.  She sent me to the Assessor’s Office but the Assessor was out of the office for a while and so I got the assistant to the Assessor.  I might as well have been speaking to a parrot.  She kept taking the information I gave her and mixing it up in her mind and when I tried to correct her, she just talked over me and tried to solve the wrong problem.  And of course, she just kept getting more and more confused and excited until she was just rattling her mantra about how these kinds of problems were usually the taxpayer’s fault.  Finally, she told me to call the Post Office because they knew what everyone’s address was supposed to be.  But when I mentioned that the Post Office was a federal agency and the state should be the ones with the official records, she told me I had to come back when the Assessor was back because I was upsetting her.

And that’s what I did.  The Assessor knew all about the incorrect names in the databases and told me that the state had issued a statement pointing to the documents that contained the correct name.  It took all of two minutes to answer the question.  The assistant was at her desk with her head buried in her paperwork and studiously ignored my interaction with her boss.  So, is the small-town bureaucrat worse than her city relative?  Absolutely not.  There is none of the moronic sadism that is on display in Gotham.  And honestly, I’m sure the assistant assessor isn’t abysmally stupid.  She’s just a fuzzy headed old lady who isn’t up to any kind of logical thinking when anything is out of the ordinary.  But it does make for an ordeal at Dunwich town Hall.  Next!!!