I have had numerous problems with bureaucracies over my sixty-nine years of life most of them sadly since I retired as readers of this blog should know by now. Signing up online for Medicare wasn't too difficult until it came to light that my chiropractor had not signed off on the insurance company coverage I had for problems resulting from a car accident I had. It took me at least a month to get the doctor to sign off on the insurance company coverage of my treatment so Medicare would pay my outstanding medical bills. You see, Medicare, it seems, assumed, since the insurance coverage was listed in my permanent file, that the insurance company was responsible for my medical coverage. The insurance company bureaucracy, however, unsurprisingly vehemently disagreed.
There was also the passport, New York driver's licence and title to the car fiasco. In 2018 I bought a used car. Unfortunately, since the passport I had identified me as Ronald Helfrich and my New York driver's licence identified me as Ronald Helfrich Jr. the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles was not going to give me title to a car I purchased with cash. They did not like the massive difference between the names of Ronald Helfricha and Ronald Helfrich Jr. Only after the pleadings of the dealership from which I bought the car did the DMV relent and give me title to my car.
In the meantime, of course, I had to deal with the United States Department of State because they are the governmental bureaucracy that issues US passports. Interestingly when I first got my US passport it said Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr. In a subsequent renewal, however, State allowed me to "change" my name from Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr to Ronald Helfrich, something I should not have been able to do. Needless to say, changing it back required a modern day labour of Hercules that even the post office in person to try to change it back to the original couldn't believe I had to do. Still, after a month or so of wasted hours spent talking to various people within the bureaucracy I was able to get Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr restored to my passport. I was once again bureaucratically consistent across driver's licence and passport.
This was, however, not the end of corporate or governmental bureaucratic muck ups. Yesterday I learned that I now have yet another bureaucratic problem to deal with, this one involving EZ Pass of New York, which began life as an affiliate of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a public agency in New York City, and which involves several state entities including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and and the New York State Thruway Authority.
Yesterday I went into my online EZ Pass account to make several changes that needed to be done. First, I changed my phone number because I had to get a new phone thanks to the legendary incompetence of Tracfone and after me existing the awful Tracfone stage left right and centre. Then I changed my email since I am doing everything in my power to no longer use anything Google including trying to get nothing sent to gmail account, something virtually impossible to do in the brave new digital age since so much online is tied to one's email. After two attempts at changing both, success.
Success with EZ Pass turned out to be very short lived for what I could not change on my EZ Pass account was my licence plate number. One of my licence plates, you see, was stolen a year or two back. The police discovered it somehow and gave me a form so I could get new plates at the DMV for no charge. Getting the new plates at the DMV on Central Avenue was easy thanks to the form. However, and this may be the reason for the muck up, I chose to get the most recent version of NY State plates and this meant a new licence plate number. This, in turn, required me to, if delinquently, change my licence plate number on EZ Pass.
Sadly and not surprisingly this turned out to be easier said than done. When I tried to change my plate number in my EZ Pass account I got a no such plate known message despite several attempts of putting in the numbers in various configurations, including the seven digit plate number on the licence plate on my car and on my registration. When I tried to call EZ Pass the wait times were over an hour and I have better things to do than wait for an hour to talk to a customer service worker about dealing with something that I shouldn't have to deal with in the first place.
This was not the only problem I had with my EZ Pass accounts page. They have my name as Ronald Helfrich Sr, my father, rather than Ronald Helfrich Jr (Jnr), me. And guess what? Yup they would not allow me to change that mistake, a mistake that never should have occurred in the first place since my vehicle registration has my name right.
Long and traumatising story short, I am giving up on EZ Pass. I may opt out of the system entirely and return the tag, itself an annoyance since you have return the tag and return it wrapped it in tin foil, something involving more expenditures of time and monies since you have to buy a requisite sized bag to post it in and you have to take a trip to the post office. Alternatively, I could just say fuck it to NY State because I don't want to have to deal for hours on the phone thanks to yet another bureaucratic feck up and spend time and energy mailing the tag back. I am frankly tired of again and again having my life disrupted by bureaucratic bullshit and I do so like to contribute to bureaucratic chaos. To both ends I deleted my credit card infomation from EZ Pass so they can't automatically charge my account. After all, I haven't used the tag on my car to traverse the NY State throughway system since before the pandemic.
It is, to say the least, annoying to have to deal with bureaucratic muckups, something the brave new digital era has made worse thanks to the fact that incorrect information is imputed regularly into online account pages and beyond. I realise that bureaucracies are necessary in a large scale society consisting of millions of people. Still it is a pity that so much of life, including so much of retired life, has to be spent dealing with the crises associated with the bullshite bureaucracies, public and private, spew and spread. And some wonder why so many people hate bureaucracies. The answer to this question is, of course, simple, while bureaucracies do provide a degree of efficiency, including efficiencies in information gathering in large scale societies with large scale bureaucracies such as the US, these large scale societies and their large scale bureaucracies have also grown way too big for their britches making it them impossible for them to really work and function efficiently and effectively anymore since the nations they service have grown way too big. And this, of course, makes it impossible, particularly when you take into account the rise of new online bureaucratic services and all the muckups those entail, for them to function efficiently and effectively any longer. A plague on all their houses.
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