I’m convinced that the only thing that keeps any bureucracy from collapsing are the people in it. You know the type – the office worker who will find an exception for you, who pulls the right file from the wrong drawer, and all these little things that nobody thought of when those rules were set in motion. People like Marcy Minder.
If systems are left on their own and the human element is all regulated, they will stop achieving anything. You can already see the result online, as services are outsourced and optimized. It once took me three months to get one big online bookseller to accept a payment that somehow hadn’t been processed correctly and reactivate my account. You see, what they did was, they told me to log into my account to fix the payment, but they’d blocked the account so I couldn’t. And I couldn’t just transfer the money either because direct transfers weren’t accepted for that kind of order. Not that anybody had told me that – I had to phone them and ask why they hadn’t accepted the payment I’d made. Turned out, the only e-mail that had been of any help, the one with the banking information, shouldn’t have been sent at all. The only helpful action was done by mistake!
Let’s face it. We don’t need heroes who beat people up. We need heroes who send out helpful emails they’re not supposed too send. Marcy is that hero!
