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Friday, November 4, 2011

Doing the bureaucracy shuffle

I attempted to register my ambulance/camper conversion. Notice the word, “attempted.” Of course, there is a snafu. There’s a minor paperwork problem that needs to be sorted out. There are budget cuts in the state office that handles these sorts of things. They are at about half strength, and also acquired more duties. Things that once took days now take weeks.

I’ve got to give my town clerk credit. She tried every work around that she could do on her end, but to no avail. At least she was able to give me the proper forms. We are at a bad point in history. The bureaucracy is getting more and more overburdened and inefficient, yet we are still expected to follow the rules.

The town clerk had a hard time even getting the state offices on the phone. To save money, they now only have one phone line. If a town clerk has an involved time consuming problem, the calls just keep stacking up. Once my clerk had the state on the phone, she had the presence of mind to also ask if there was anything special that I needed to do to the former ambulance. The good news is that as long as there’s no change in the body dimensions or transmission, the town clerk can just change the title from “ambulance “ to “camper.”

All in all, it’s a darn good thing that I did not wait until the last minute to sort out the paperwork. While I wait for that to be straightened out, I’ll continue working on the project.

-Sixbears

4 comments:

  1. You have to have the patients of Job to work with bureaucracy.

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  2. They could always reduce the "make work" paper work burden that they created to justify increasing their budgets and staffs (just as any business would have to do). But since this is the government they won't.

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  3. I suspect some time soon government clerks will discretely solicit bribes for issuing hard to get paper work.

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  4. Dizzy: indeed, and I don't.
    Anon: now they won't.
    K: we really don't want to go down that road. Look what's it has done to India.

    ReplyDelete