Many collecting benefits never visit the Department of Labor in Manhattan, but after a recent lapse in payment, I was told it was mandatory that I come to the downtown offices located on Varick Street to sort out the matter. Offices run by the state are notoriously difficult to deal with—or at the very least make the customer service representatives for online gambling sites seem warm and caring in comparison—and now I see why. Actual interaction with certain temperaments at the Department of Labor’s downtown digs is something straight out of Kafka’s The Trial.
A variety of diluted (and accurate) clichés spring to mind when imagining bureaucratic offices: fluorescent lights bouncing off pasty walls adorned with inspirational poster art; a cubicle sea, housing frustrated and underpaid staffers brandishing agitated energy; the dank stench of coffee in an antique percolator along with humming vending machines tucked off somewhere you’d rather not find.
My problems began while I was in the waiting area trying to reach someone at the Telephone Claims Center (TCC) on my cell phone. While I waited for a landline (I was informed that during high-call traffic times, cell phones don’t get through correctly…useful news I could’ve used over the past few weeks when I tried for hours to get someone on the line), I continued to try my cell. The minute I began, however, a woman from Employee Services chided me for using it while I sat in the “no cell-phone zone,” a dirty chair within several rows of tattered office furniture. They resembled those sad seats found seating attendees at weekly AA meetings every Wednesday night, at a local church. Only here they don’t offer free coffee and nobody is disclosing the time they ran out of booze on a Sunday and downed a $60 bottle of Obsession cologne instead.
I still couldn’t get through on the cell, so I returned to my seat, remaining there for an hour and a half, listening to the flutter of interoffice chatter, the pick-peck of keyboards and a security guard braying in laughter at a joke only he seemed to be in on.
Resistance to their quotidian protocols marked me as a potential problem, and I could feel the eyes of the office on me. A boorish guard approached and sternly instructed me to move to a chair on the “other side” of the waiting area, since I was apparently in the wrong one. I tried moving over, but my ability to discern between phantom sections proved faulty—and didn’t sit well with the warden.
“There are two different sections, sir, you have to sit over there.” She pointed to the six chairs to the right, versus the six chairs to the left that, for the last hour or so, I had been in anyway until the headmistress had scolded me. The urge to get down to some serious drinking began to creep up from deep down—and it was barely 11 a.m.
I was finally shown to a phone on the other side of the main partition, which acted as a protecting reef for the cubicles beyond it. When I finally got a live voice, a testy operative hissed at me from the other end and asked why I hadn’t filed one week a few weeks ago—that’s where the lapse in payment ostensibly stemmed from. I realized this single oversight was the cause of all my trouble, and I was made aware of the payment interruption after getting denied use of my debit card for a Red Bull and a can of tuna at my local bodega. Grim times in Suck City.
The voice then requested the mailing address of a newspaper I had done an article for in December, which I neither had nor realized I needed, so I leaned over to the woman working behind me and very politely asked if she could just quickly look up an address for me online. Assuming woeful tales of lengthy wait times and dropped calls must be common suffrage in these parts, I thought she’d graciously comply. Her gray locks almost burned to a cinder, however, at the mere suggestion of it. In fact, she was paralyzed by the request, shocked that I would ask so bold a favor from a complete stranger.
“Well I’m in the middle of something here, OK?” she guffawed, “Okaaaay? I mean, I’m in the middle of doing my work. On this computer. What I’m supposed to be doing.”
I felt like I mistakenly asked her to explain Advanced Particle Theory, and on her lunch break no less. “If you can’t,” I replied, “I understand. But as an employee here, I’m sure you can appreciate how difficult it is to get someone on the phone.” Before I could make what is the obvious suggestion in this situation, a plausible solution presented itself to her: “I suppose I could Google it.”
Here, much like the situation in the computer lab on my first breezy “information session” visit (where I baffled the “attendant” after I produced a USB portable drive to retrieve a file and was forced to spend several minutes explaining that the device wasn’t something from Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series) I began to grasp why she seemed so offended and frustrated when I asked for help. Here was a woman in the late autumn of her career trying to deal with technology a younger generation has grown up with, and she still has the days of filing everything in triplicate in the back of her head. Google, or anything on the Interwebs, isn’t her native language.
Several long minutes passed as I waited for her to just lean to the side and tell me the address. All two lines of it. I watched her eyes darting all over the screen searching for the buried treasure escaping her. By the six-minute mark, I suggested another way to go: “If you’re having trouble, try entering in the name of the paper, and add ‘address’ to the search.” The advice resonated in a profound way, because her reaction of dawning comprehension was not unlike the kind found on the face of someone walking along a sidewalk and suddenly looking up, only to see a child holding a bucket of water balloons, upending it as you walk underneath.
The act of looking up a mailing address online for me in order to relay it on the phone had taken nearly eight minutes. But she was diligent: She not only printed out the address (instead of telling it to me) but walked right past me in order to shimmy around the other partition to get to the printer, add paper to it and then wait for the other jobs in the cue to print out, before grabbing the paper and walking it back around the partition, sitting back down and handing it to me. She seemed almost vindicated. I’d somehow broken through and added my useless task to her bureaucratic chain of command.
Given the experiential disconnect with the technology permeating our lives now, is it any wonder why everything associated with staterun procedure takes so long? Antiquated work sensibilities of State or City entities are nothing new, rather a stinging reminder to try and stay as far away as possible from dealing with it. I have a theory that it’s intentionally set up this way, or is perhaps a happy accident that the overlords in charge care not to change. Keep the brutes in check…
Yes, the fact that I’m receiving assistance in these cruel times is a boon and one that allows me to (barely) pay bills. But my drive to get off this system with a steady revenue stream is fueled not by greed, inconvenience or upward mobility. It’s simply so that I don’t have to deal with this bullshit in person ever again.
Daniel McCarthy was recently hired as a staff writer in Boston. He is currently at work on a novel.
