As we start out today, you will need to pack your luggage into that kind of hopper thing there. Goods get their own railway but we get to take the escalator.
This is a journey which isn't designed to go anywhere necessarily but to demonstrate the utter pointlessness of the vast majority of my working day.
Unlike people out there who do genuine work in the world and to whom all y'all should be exceptionally thankful for and kind to at the moment (as indeed you should do normally), I wrangle numbers for a living and send out correspondence based upon the alignment and processing of those numbers into elaborate grids that we call tax returns and financial reports.
If I am in the middle of doing something, I will admit to being completely useless at multi tasking. I can do one thing at a time and put things on hold, while they sit inside a list of priorities while I might be doing something else. All of that works reasonably well up to the point where I have to wait upon someone else to do their bit before I can move on.
So much of my working life is spent waiting for email replys after I have requested more information, or alternatively waiting for electronic filing of documents to governmental organisations such as the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, or the NSW Office of State Revenue.
The process of electronic filing usually involves logging in to systems via a virtual private network or other secure connection and then waiting as the spinning donuts of doom rotate and grind the gears of my mind, before I get a confirmation document and then start scanning things.
However, when there are meatbag operators on the other end of a system who just as incompetent, capricious, eejititious, and daft as I am, then to get the next step of some arcane process started, usually means that whatever it is gets escalated.
On today's journey, we are on what I imagine that those escalations happen to be. Just like an elevator ride where you have innocuous music playing so as to distract from the white noise of the elevator, escalations come with their own kind of music; which is almost always the same as the last time that you were either on hold for extended periods of time. I know the on hold music almost note for note for the ATO, ASIC, Telstra, the NSW Office of State Revenue, as well as MyGov and the Australian Business Register.
Once you have been on hold for a sufficiently long enough period of time, and you can no longer see the entrance to the escalator well that you walked into, then it becomes really difficult to work out if the escalator is moving upwards or the rest of the world is slowly sinking at an equal but opposite rate.
While you are on a real escalator you can hear the sounds of clunking as the steps pass underneath the combs at either end and as they change direction from top to bottom and bottom to top. While you are on an escalator where someone else has to do some kind of work for you, then the only sounds that you are likely to hear are the sounds of your own brain clunking as you wonder why nothing appears to be moving at all. In the absolute worst example of a thing that I had to have escalated, due to the fact that the original person who was working on the case had been let go in a series of government cut backs, the eventual process of escalation involved someone looking at the pile of files that had been left behind and actually moving them around. All of the paperwork had been in order for months but because there was no one to sign off on it, nothing happened until my escalations had reached the point of being livid.
In the world of legal proceedings, you can threaten someone with the vague stick of the ombudsman. Again, there's little that an ombudsman will actually do unless that's also escalated but I think that just the suggestion that you intend to escalate something in response to their escalation, heightens everyone's sense of tension despite nothing concrete happening.
The escalator that we're on is unlike the ones in Hong Kong which are more like a commuter train service between the various levels of the city in that there are no fancy windows to look and no sense that we're going anywhere.
I think that a lot of escalation of anxiety that we do in our minds is like this as it doesn't really help very much at all. The best cure for the anxiety of escalation is just to get off and stop worrying; though that is easier said than done and you can not just tell people to do this. Someone who is in the middle of an internal escalation already knows that they are and telling someone to calm down is the height of stupidity.
Fortunately for us, at the top of today's journey up the imaginary escalator there is a train station. There are no porters to help us with our luggage on this train and worse, this train is just as frustrating as the escalator.
The train station at the top of these sheer cliff faces, is a grimy little platform which only has an 'Authority To Travel' machine; which means that we shan't be getting a ticket until we're on board. It is also as windy as all get out and so we may have to shelter by hiding behind a rubbish bin as a wind break.
No comments:
Post a Comment