Technical Difficulties

Several years ago I had to buy a new refrigerator and Sears kindly gave me an address for a rebate. I wouldn’t ordinarily have bothered but a major appliance is a major appliance and the amount of the rebate was considerable. I thought it would be worth a little time and trouble. Hours and hours later as I was still navigating the forms and trying to find information that they hadn’t given me (and making a number of calls to be told “Wrong department”), I finally realized that the entire process was designed to make you give up. No one was going to part with a dime of precious rebate money unless they were absolutely against a wall. It took hours more time and trouble but out of nothing but sheer stubbornness, I persisted and several months later, I finally received a check and a thank you for my business.

Now, in the age of plague, I understand that this is exactly how government operates. From food stamps to unemployment claims to the Internal Revenue Service and the Small Business Administration loan programs, it’s one long, complicated, convoluted rebate scam, written in doublespeak and meticulously designed to make you throw up your hands in disgust and do without. The portals don’t work, the claim trackers are useless, the websites are a joke and the telephones are not answered. You can’t log on or call in or check status. And if by some divine intervention, you should get on the websites or manage to get into a call queue, you can safely give up the next several hours of your life waiting until the office closes or the website crashes. Either way, you lose. Even a successfully placed claim or application will be challenged if not outright denied (more or less automatically) and the appeal process makes the whole initial application process look like child’s play. It’s all justified by the systems being overwhelmed by the numbers of people needing help or the old stand by, “technical difficulties”. In other words,

call it malice or stupidity or ineptitude or fate, we’re mostly on our own.

I don’t know what we’ll be going back to or whether we’ll have learned anything when this is over. But my gut tells me that no matter what life on the other side of this virus is like, nothing is ever going to be the same again.