A labyrinth with no exit

[B]By MAR-VIC CAGURANGAN[/B] [I]Special to the[/I] Saipan Tribune

I quit my fulltime job two months ago so I can attend to the special needs of my 18-year-old son, who has autism. I have since taken trips to at least seven agencies in my attempts to get him into a special program. Some of these agencies I have visited two to three times.

I haven’t had any luck. Each meeting concluded with the bureaucrats referring me to a different agency. Each visit ended up with me having to produce more “required” documents. I always walked away with a new list of people that I was sent to call and see. Now I have two pages of these lists. Alas I’m still stuck in this maze of absurdity that seems to have no exit.

“It’s like running an obstacle course,” a friend of mine said when I recounted my endless struggle.

The “obstacle course” simile is an understatement. Dealing with the bureaucracy is more like navigating a labyrinth of lunacy. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare from which you want to wake up.

I always wonder if there is ever a way out of what seems to be the universally illogical practices of governments. Think of Kafka’s novels, which “evoked the hopelessness of individuals confronting a relentless, machine-like society in which they are minor cogs.”

Rules, regulations, and policies are in place supposedly as a means to the end, but in the sphere of bureaucracy following the rules to the letter has become the end in itself. Bureaucracy is a faceless puppeteer that manipulates those too lazy to think. Rational thinking, discretion, and good judgment have been replaced by these suffocating rules that oftentimes do not work. How many hours do we waste every day or every week trying to navigate these regulations and then recovering from the holdup and jumble that ensue? (By the way, do we need legislators making more inane laws?)

In The Death of Common Sense, Philip K. Howard noted how we all waste a great deal of time mired in mundane tasks that create no benefit to anyone.

Incidentally, I took yet another trip to another government agency yesterday and went through the usual filling out of another form and giving an interview. This time my story had gotten longer, considering that it was the seventh agency I had visited. The social worker was really nice. She tried to be helpful. She made several phone calls on my son’s behalf. And each call was capped with a recommendation for her to call another person, and another person, and another person. Obviously, I could empathize with her situation, except that witnessing this bureaucrat getting the bureaucratic runaround felt like watching a satire, in which she is trapped in the quagmire of the very system where she works. It was almost amusing to watch and I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

So I hit another dead end, and left her office with yet another list of required documents to produce and more people to call.

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[I]Mar-Vic Cagurangan is a Guam-based journalist. She is the former managing editor of Glimpses Publications and is now a full-time domestic goddess. Send feedback to mar_vic_cagurangan@yahoo.com.[/I]