loading . . . The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner. Mood: Maliciously compliant.
I can't express how much I utterly hate the "Continuing Disability Review."
It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: _"Are you still disabled?"_
As if my blindness were a seasonal allergy. As if I might have woken up last Tuesday, blinked, and realized that my optic nerves had decided to regenerate spontaneously.
This week, I received The Letter. It demanded "updated medical evidence" to prove that I—a man who has been blind since birth—am, in fact, still blind.
I called the number. I navigated the phone tree hellscape. I finally reached a human being. Let’s call her "Karen from Compliance."
"I have the documents in PDF format," I told her, using my polite, I haven't had my morning tea so make this easy on me, voice. "I can email them to you right now. You’ll have them in ten seconds."
"We cannot accept email," Karen said. Her voice was flat, dry, and sounded like stale coffee and rigid adherence to a rulebook written in 1994. "It is a security risk. You must mail physical copies, or you can fax them."
"Fax them?" I asked. "You want me to fax you medical records when you could just delete the email after saving the attachments?"
"Those are the options, sir. If we don't receive them by Friday, your benefits will be suspended."
I didn't understand why they couldn't just look back in my file, noticed nothing had changed in decades, and update it based on past data.
She said it with a challenge in her tone. She knew who she was talking to. She was talking to a blind man living below the poverty line. She assumed that "fax it" was an impossible hurdle. She assumed I would have to find a ride to a library, pay twenty cents a page, and struggle with a physical machine I couldn't read. She was counting on the friction of the physical world to make me give up.
She forgot one thing.
I am a nerd. And I have an internet connection.
"Okay," I said, my voice dropping into the cool, smooth, ‘Let’s systemically tango,’ tone of a man with a plan. "I will fax them. What is the number?"
I hung up. And then, I went to work.
She wanted evidence? Oh boy, I would give her evidence.
I didn't just pull the recent files. I went into the archives. I dug into the deep, digital bedrock of my hard drive. I pulled records from when I was five. I pulled the surgical notes from my cerebral palsy treatments. I pulled the intake forms from every specialist, every therapist, every social worker who has ever written a note about my "deficits."
I compiled a single, monolithic PDF. It was a monument to medical trauma. It was a library of diagnosis.
It was five hundred and twelve pages long.
Single-spaced.
I opened my preferred internet faxing service. This is a tool that allows me to send a fax purely through digital data. It would cost $20, exactly the amount someone had donated to the blog last week, but if I didn't do this, I would lose all my benifits. It costs me zero paper. It costs me zero toner.
By the way, your tips keep me writing.
But for the recipient?
For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.
I imagined Karen’s fax machine. It was probably an old, beige beast sitting in the corner of a gray office. It was likely low on paper. It was almost certainly low on patience.
I uploaded the file. The file size was massive. The progress bar on my screen reader ticked up. _Uploading... 20%... 50%... 80%..._
I hit "Send."
And then, I sat back and listened to the most beautiful sound in the world.
"Your fax has been sent," my screen reader announced.
I grinned.
I imagined the scene in that office.
At first, it would just be a single page. _Whirrr. Chunk._ A standard medical form. Karen would ignore it.
Then, page two. _Whirrr. Chunk._
Page three. _Whirrr. Chunk._
By page fifty, the machine would be heating up. The smell of hot toner would start to fill the cubicle. The rhythmic _chunk-chunk-chunk_ of the printing would become a drone, a mechanical chant of malicious compliance.
By page one hundred, the paper tray would run out. The machine would start beeping. That high-pitched, insistent _beep-beep-beep_ that demands attention. Karen would have to get up. She would have to find a ream of paper. She would have to feed the beast.
And the beast would not stop.
Because I had set the retry limit to "Infinity." If the line busied out? It would call back. If the paper ran out? It would wait. It was a digital siege engine.
I sent them everything. I sent them the eye charts that prove I can’t read eye charts. I sent them the physical therapy logs. I sent them the blurry scans of notes written by doctors who are long since dead.
I sent them the Tsunami of Truth.
I wanted them to hold the weight of it. I wanted them to physically feel the burden of proof they place on disabled bodies. They want us to document our existence? Fine. Here is my existence, one sheet of hot, curled paper at a time.
Two hours later, my phone rang.
"Mr. Kingett?"
It was Karen. She sounded breathless. She sounded like she was standing next to a machine that was hyperventilating. In the background, I could hear a rhythmic _whir-chunk, whir-chunk_.
"Yes?" I answered, my voice the picture of innocent helpfulness.
"Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."
"Oh, you're out of toner? It's jammed? Oh my! Oh, I’m so sorry," I said, putting exactly zero percent sincerity into the apology. "But you said you couldn't accept email. You said I had to provide _complete_ documentation. I’m just following the rules, Karen. I wouldn't want my benefits to be suspended because I missed documentation, so here's documentation all the way back to when I'm five years old."
"Jesus Christ, We have it!" she snapped. "We have enough! Please, just… cancel the rest."
"I’m afraid I can’t do that," I lied. "It’s an automated process. Once it starts, it has to finish. Security protocols, you understand."
There was a long, strangled silence on the line. Then, a defeated sigh.
"Fine! Fine," she snapped. "We will mark your file as updated."
"Thank you," I said. "Have a wonderful day."
I hung up.
I sat there in my quiet apartment, eating a cookie. I imagined the pile of paper in that office, a physical mountain of evidence testifying to the fact that yes, I am blind, and yes, I am smarter than your bureaucracy.
If you enjoyed this tiny victory in a hostile world, you might enjoy, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-paperwork-flood/
