The Trial, Lah…

For those of you unaware of my incredibly pretentious literary reference, The Trial was a novel by the master of paranoia, Franz Kafka, and “Lah” is the useless tag word that Singaporeans stick on the end of their sentences. Lah.

Mostly I titled this post this way because I currently feel like I am in a Franz Kafka novel surrounded by little yellow people.

Yes, yes, I know that is an incredibly politically incorrect thing to say but at the moment I am daunted and mightily frustrated by the bureaucratic machine that, until I came here, I had thought to be the figments of imagination of a mad genius and not something that could possibly exist in reality in such an exaggerated form. Then I got over here and realized that Kafka had been playing it down.

The plans which are currently being foiled by the Powers That Be (Who require three copies, signed, in color coded paper, with appendices A through G attached here, here, and here, but not in copy three which is for administrative purposes, unless appendix D is signed here, in which case you need appendix D iii, and an additional copy for the appendix D iii processing department, which will require you to fill this form, as well as get sub-appendices… ah, you get the idea…) are to make myself once more nice and legal. It seemed simple enough; start a business. You own it, you work with people you know, you call your own hours, and you don’t have any idiot manager to blame except yourself, a much more acceptable–if somewhat scarier–proposition.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, the Easy-To-Use, Standardized-And-Universal-Format that is supposed to be so easy to fill out and process has been subjected to repeated submission, usually rejected because whoever we are dealing with doesn’t agree with the way it was filled out, even though it was filled out as per the instructions of the LAST civil servant I saw, who told me that this was what I needed to do for an acceptable form when he/she rejected it after I followed the advice of the civil servant previous to that.

So it would seem that this incredibly standardized, universal system of form filling and processing is highly subject to individual interpretation, and whatever advice one duly authorized civil servant gives can be automatically, arbitrarily countermanded by the next one. This could be due to any number of reasons from they don’t like the look of you, to they don’t like the person who gave you advice last time and are inflicting their office political war on you, to they just got rejected at the last government run Social Development Unit party (“Breed! Be fruitful and multiply! That’s an order!”) and they’re not having a good morning so they don’t see why you should either.

Having just spoken to my blogless friend DangerGene Whitlock (Whose baby is due in two weeks! Go Gene!) he presented an interesting solution to help circumvent this problem.

Start taking names.

This, apparently has worked for him in the past. The theory is that if you take the name of the person who is dealing with you, this will trigger the genetically in-built paranoia that is characteristic of Singaporeans in general and civil servants in particular who are Always Watching Their Ass. It will ensure that they try not to be too “creative” in advising you out of sheer hostile whimsey. The pay off comes when you deal with the next person and they give you the completely contradictory information. Now you cite the name of the first person, ask to take the name of the current person, and ask if there’s some way to corroborate with management between this diametric opposition. Now the Always Watching Their Ass behavioural paradigm is kicked in as they realize that a meeting with management to deal with the discrepancy is going to cause untold amounts of trouble for them personally and profressionally, and so they wisely decide that having a bit of bureaucratic fun at your expense is simply not worth a, at worst, dismissal and, at least, boring lecture about administrative ethics, so they usually just let it go, and the always reliable human need to not make life difficult for others if it means you pay for it too prevails.

Bureaucrats. Just. Plain. SUCK.