bureaucratic brick wall
sorry for the inconvenience
but I am your bureaucratic brick wall
I look like a person
but I am really just a mechanism
I filter through forms
and I push paper in electronic format
I communicate in templates
and I offer several specific services only
I will not go in the directions above
or beyond — I will not take even one extra step
or do any small kindness for you
because I am not what you think I am
you must have me mistaken for a human being
I am not
I am your bureaucratic brick wall
I might ask you for a strictly procedural request
but can only answer the narrowest
range of questions in return
sorry for the inconvenience
any more would be above my pay grade
and I wasn’t trained for that
I have no flexibility
or adaptability
or compassionate understanding
or common sense
what-so-ever…as a brick wall, I do not feel
in fact, I barely hear you right now at all
sorry for the inconvenience
you can email me again tomorrow
and I will have no recollection
that I ever tried to help you
I am a bureaucratic brick wall
you want answers
but there are none
only the mealy-mouthed politeness
of the bureaucratic brick wall
Garbage Notes:
This poem is about the frustration of hitting a bureaucratic dead end. Needing help, needing answers, and you just can’t seem to get anywhere. It’s for that moment when you’ve exhausted all your options, getting mired in the very system that was put in place to facilitate service.
It’s awful, especially when you’re applying for a job and there’s all these procedural hoops you have to jump through. You follow all the steps. You go along with all the etiquette. You obey all the rules. And when it’s your turn to be given a little courtesy, all you get is dead silence.
I wrote this poem after being so completely at my wits’ end, following up on this one particular interview for a state job a while back. The interview went really well. Like, seriously, I’ve had way worse interviews and have gotten offers the next day. But this one was taking weeks and weeks.
Then weeks turned into more than a month, and every effort to follow up went nowhere. All I kept hearing were these robotically rehearsed answers from HR representatives, actual human beings who were trained in reciting the most pathetic stock boilerplate lines because for whatever reason they were taught to avoid the ugly confrontational human truth of an interaction at all costs.
If I think about it, though, this poem is as much about the tragedy of being on the bureaucracy side of things as it is about being on the user side of things. I’ve been in service roles where all you could do was tell a person, ‘look, I’m sorry, this is the policy, is there anything else I can help you with?’ And then you’re met with pure naked anger. And you just have to sit there and take it. Because it’s your fucking job, to be stoic, to be the sounding board for impotent rage.
Sometimes there really is nothing you can tell the desperate frenzied maniac on the other end of the line. The people doling out the canned responses are as stuck as the people listening to them.
I wish we could all be more humane about it. But it’s a world where we’d rather have systems that work than human beings who are happy.
Maybe someday it’ll change. I don’t know that it will. Maybe not in my lifetime. But I do know this—writing stories and poems about it does help.
Franco Amati 2024
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If only ‘they’ were sorry though. Sadly I don’t think they are.
Well expressed piece.
Systems no longer serve customers but rather, profit, sadly.
Have hit this wall many times in the last few weeks! Well put. Who are these people? How do they sleep at night? I think they might be NPC's, they might look human, talk like humans, but I am convinced they are just human skins filled with bureaucratic programming. So probably no sleep for them then .... just an OFF switch.