Public servitude is a crime against humanity, no matter which side of the desk you’re on.
Anyone who’s had to deal with any kind of official paperwork (i.e. everyone) will know the creepy feeling of dread and depression that comes upon entering a public office and having to make that first visual contact with the deadened eyes of a member of the bureaucratic race. Just the unadorned fluorescent lighting alone is enough to induce a bout of nausea as you stand there in a stuffy grey Sartrian hellscape that’s bereft of anything beautiful, kind, warm, or even remotely human. It’s a place where the meaninglessness of existence hits you with full force in the face, like a gigantic slap into reality planned by an officious malevolent God and administered through his heartless, soulless, zombie-like demonic minions: the bureaucrats.
The only way to deal with public servants is to accept Dante’s advice to the hellbound: ‘Ye who enter, forsake all hope.’ In other words, the first thing you should do when you find out you have to do something that involves any kind of bureaucratic procedure, is to accept that you are going to hell. If you do that, if you lose hope that anything will resolve itself easily or logically or in any way to your convenience or favor over the next three days, then the infernal torture you’re about to endure will be relatively not-as-completely-loathesome. You’ll still want to kill yourself, but if you expect the absolute worst, you could probably hold out until you come across some cyanide or a gun, rather than seriously considering ways you could put yourself out of your misery with the nearest handy office utensil.
Having forsaken all hope, you can now proceed into the land that reason forgot. First you’ll put together all the notarized documents and photocopies of notarized documents and proofs of residence and proof that you’re not a criminal photocopy of the proof of non-criminal proofs of notarized residence and 126 passport-sized photos you’ll have been informed you’ll need before being told that half of them are missing or invalid or out of date. Then you’ll go back and do the same thing again, because they’ll have forgotten to tell you about another document you also needed. Why does this happen? There are two reasons: 1) public servants don’t care, because they hate themselves and therefore hate you, and 2) they’ve become dumb the way domesticated animals have become dumb after their ancestors were extricated from their wild habitat and forced into a life that revolves solely around providing milk and meat to their evil masters (a.k.a. us).
Those two crucial factors go a long way to explaining why you are wasting precious hours of your life in a public office. But there’s a more fundamental reason behind the ineptness, laziness, and overall bovine incompetence of the average public servant, and why you are paying the price for it all. They are wasting your life because their own lives are being wasted too. In other words, they are jealous of you. They are jealous that you don’t have to watch your spirit decay and your soul slowly wither away in that hopeless, loveless cement cave of drudgery and despair that is their workplace. They despise that you have a life, they hate that your heart still beats, and now they have you right where they want you. As you stand there with a sweat-soaked pile of crumpled documents in your hands and that sheepish sucker smile on your face, wishing them a perky peppy ‘Good Morning!’ as if they could give two shits about any semblance of civility anymore in their dreary existence, they know that they now have the chance to grab you by the testicles and twist them so hard that your privileged little college-graduate pretty-boy face will crumple up into that of a big blubbering baby crying for mommy the way they do on the inside every day that they spend in their pathetic den of sad.
However, it’s not the bureaucrat’s fault that s/he’s being a prick. It’s the system of bureaucratization and public servitude itself that is the culprit. It is a crime against humanity to take a real human being and turn them into one of those poor miserable creatures who ends up gazing vacantly into your eyes, not understanding a single thing you say, and then either maliciously or idiotically telling you to do a whole bunch of stuff that their colleague will tell you to do the opposite of when you return the next day and the day after that, all so that you, the citizen, can obtain legal permission from Mr. State to carry out your Gonad-given right to travel or work or have a home, because Mr. State is looking for any chance he can get to create extra paperwork to charge you for so as to pay for his fighter jets’ oil bill (and if he has a little something left over, maaaybe your child’s school desk). It’s the system that is at fault, because it degrades and dehumanizes those who do it’s dirty work for it, and they in turn degrade us so as to satisfy their need to redirect unto you the vomit-inducing pain of sadistic (low-)salaried slavery they are being subjected to themselves every minute of every decade in their death march toward a thank you certificate and a handshake.
So how do you deal with it all when your time comes? Here’s what you do: whatever they say or do, you just grin and take it in the ass. If they tell you one conflicting and irrational thing after another, you just do as they say. If you complain, you’re screwed. They can smell blood, and they will tear you apart. If you act superior, you’re screwed. Remember that they really do hate you. They hate all of us. So unless you know people higher up in the chain or can afford some hefty bribes, you just have to give up hope and accept that these next few hours will be spent around stale perfume, bad shoes, limping security guards, and urine-stinking corridors as you are either gruffly ignored or misdirected with curt grunts from one shoddy office to the other.
Now go and pay a hundred dollars for a 6-month passport extension because you have to, fellow peon sucker.
