I Hate Bureaucracy: Part I
Personal Dealings with Red Tape
By Daniel Muniz

I hate bureaucracy. I despise dealing with red tape and the idiocy attached to it. And oftentimes, I try to go to great lengths to avoid loathing the sensible intelligent people who are a part of it because it is really their job, not them, that propagate bureaucratic red tape. However, this polemic is not about government bureaucracy or taxes, but rather, corporate red tape.

I moved into my new house with a sense of satisfaction that I may have found a place that may be the home for the rest of my life. I have come a long ways from my bachelor days of apartments to my first house of married life. And that house was a nice place for being a first time homebuyer. However, my second new home is bigger, has a much better layout in its architectural design, and has almost all the features that I dreamed of.

But the bureaucracy attached to it was not part of my dreams.

Although I used the same builder for the second house, the customer service that I previously enjoyed was not present. The construction managers lied to me, misled me, and just gave me the runaround on a number of important issues that they were contractually obligated to resolve. Many homebuyers experience the same thing in which a builder develops a case of amnesia the moment the closing papers are signed.

During that time, I also had problems with my utilities. I opted to use SBC for telephone and DSL service and I chose Time Warner for cable television.

My DSL connection went down twice. The first time, it was down for more than 24 hours. The second time, in which I only had the account for three weeks, it was down for about a week. Each day of down time I spent over an hour on the phone talking to various levels of technical support. The first tier, located in India, was only able to help with basic troubleshooting like if your modem is unplugged. Other than that, they were worthless. Even the technicians who actually lived in the city and performed the service calls had to deal with their own intra-departmental red tape. By the time of the eighth day, SBC called me to tell me that they were going to resolve the trouble ticket by the end of the day. I then told them that the problem was already resolved because I now have a Time Warner cable modem and it works great.
 

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Unfortunately, Time Warner wasn’t much better either. When their technician installed the cable for my television sets, my wife handed them a check that covered the installation, the deposit, and other fees, which amounted to $269.47. We soon received a bill that excluded that amount. Their billing department insisted that they never got the check. I promptly faxed them over a check image that showed that the check was deposited into their account. Two days later I called them up again only to discover that they never got the fax. This time I told them that I was staying on the phone until a live human being picked it up. Afterwards, they told me that they would forward the fax to their collections department to research it.

There, I lost it! I explained to them that if they have incontrovertible proof that they cashed and deposited my check, so in my book, there is nothing to research because this issue is now closed. They then informed me of the bureaucratic red tape that they had to follow. A few days later, my wife called them to find out that they only credited $209 to my account. Again, it took more days and more conversations to get that straightened.

The Furniture Company where we bought our living room sets and bedroom frame was another story. Upon delivery, a back pillow was missing from a sectional sofa set. The delivery people called up their office and eventually it was decided that another pillow would be available in a couple of days at the same store where we bought it. Since I only work a few minutes away, it would be a snap for me to pick it up.

The next day, the salesman calls me up and then tells me that the pillow had been ordered and it will take two weeks for it to get shipped to my house. I was annoyed but there was nothing I could do. The next day, my wife calls the Furniture Company again and finds out that the pillow is now there. I dropped by to pick it up only to discover that it is the wrong pillow. This time my wife has a long drawn out conversation with them on how to get our missing pillow. In the end, the Furniture Company decides that they will just deliver “another” sofa set to replace the one with the missing pillow. At that point, we gave up arguing and just let the red tape takes it natural course.

My list of diatribes of the first 30 days of living in my new house could go on but I will just say that I do get annoyed when many of conservative colleagues wax so eloquently about how superior the Free Market is over Socialism. I have a degree in Accounting and I am a big proponent of Free Enterprise, but I cannot ignore the fact that private business can be as bureaucratic, wasteful, and as worthless as governmental entities doing the same thing.

I know that there are still plenty of private companies out there who are smart, efficient, and hungry for your business. And these outfits are also willing to do the job right the first time. That is why I always root for the young upstart companies who are willing to shake things up to keep the markets competitive and innovative.

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