Bureaucrats are one of the things that make American life purgatorial.\u00a0 But small-town bureaucrats are a special case that is worth discussing because of their emergent characteristics.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You would wait in one of these lines and hope against hope for quick service.\u00a0 Eventually, this hope would cruelly die in that first line.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t sure from moment to moment whether she had lapsed into a coma.\u00a0 But regardless of her demeanor and obvious imbecility the only thing you knew going in was that she would declare your problem didn\u2019t fit her services ands she would redirect you to the back of some other line.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But small towns do not possess this kind of apparatus.\u00a0 Even at tax time they do not possess the vast numbers of citizens needed to turn lines into killing fields.\u00a0 They just don\u2019t.\u00a0 But what the bureaucracy of a small town does possess in spades is kooks.\u00a0 Once again, they\u2019re all women (well not the road department but they\u2019re not really bureaucrats) and they often have faces that could stop clocks but their scope of influence is limited.\u00a0 There just aren\u2019t enough people in town hall to endlessly stall a tax payer from receiving some government service.\u00a0 So instead of delay they\u2019ve developed the art of obfuscation to a high art form.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And it was complicated.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She sent me to the Assessor\u2019s Office but the Assessor was out of the office for a while and so I got the assistant to the Assessor.\u00a0 I might as well have been speaking to a parrot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s fault.\u00a0 Finally, she told me to call the Post Office because they knew what everyone\u2019s address was supposed to be.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what I did.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It took all of two minutes to answer the question.\u00a0 The assistant was at her desk with her head buried in her paperwork and studiously ignored my interaction with her boss.\u00a0 So, is the small-town bureaucrat worse than her city relative?\u00a0 Absolutely not.\u00a0 There is none of the moronic sadism that is on display in Gotham.\u00a0 And honestly, I\u2019m sure the assistant assessor isn\u2019t abysmally stupid.\u00a0 She\u2019s just a fuzzy headed old lady who isn\u2019t up to any kind of logical thinking when anything is out of the ordinary.\u00a0 But it does make for an ordeal at Dunwich town Hall.\u00a0 Next!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bureaucrats are one of the things that make American life purgatorial.\u00a0 But small-town bureaucrats are a special case that is worth discussing because of their<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3366,1263],"tags":[714,3341],"class_list":["post-37942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-bureaucracy","tag-dunwich"],"yoast_head":"\n