Well, of course, these days you don’t get to speak to the
government department which made the erroneous calculation; you get to speak to
a call centre. Fortunately, the call centre which this particular government
department uses is a good one. The operator understood the circumstances
immediately, pulled up my notes and told me what the bureaucrats had done
wrong. (Seems some clerk didn’t know the difference between ‘per calendar month’
and ‘every four weeks.’ Amazing, but there you are.)
‘But,’ said the call centre operative, ‘there’s nothing I
can do about it because I don’t work for the government department. You’ll have
to contact them yourself.’
Fair enough; I wrote them a letter, and today I got a
re-calculated amount which is correct. There was no covering letter
acknowledging my correspondence, much less an apology, but at least they’ve got
the amount right.
And that’s how things work now. A government department gets
something wrong, so I have to call a call centre to discover the nature of the
error, and then I have to write to the government department to tell them what
the call centre says they’ve done wrong. What a convoluted, over-complicated
and increasingly dysfunctional world we live in.
I once worked for a government department, and my job
involved the making of calculations. If I got one wrong, I would expect an
irate person on the other end of a phone line, bending my personal ear in no
uncertain terms. We didn’t work from a ring-fenced establishment, protected
from the wrath of those we had wronged by a third party in a call centre. There
was direct contact, and that gives you all the more reason not to get it wrong
in the first place.
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