Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale...
A tale of a fateful trip to the Seattle Office of the Washington State Insurance Commissioner. Housed in a dark stinky corner of an old building on 3rd Avenue. The door is always locked but there’s a doorbell, an intercom and a phone. These three methods along with old fashioned knocking can be used to try to gain access to the office. The three options are offered only to slow you down a bit, to make you wonder if one isn’t working, should you try another, or should you try all three and then try knocking. The door isn’t locked for security reasons. The door is locked to slow you down, to give the office workers inside a chance to clean up, put their pants and shoes back on, fold up their cots and pretend like they’d been working for the last 5 hours before the messenger showed up.
Any actual work done by the Insurance Commissioner’s office is done in Olympia and consists of schmoozing, lobbying lobbyists, long lunches with politicians, eating, drinking, playing golf and other bullshit. The Seattle office appears to have no real function. When they finally opened the door and let me in, I couldn’t help but think of the seven deadly sins and how they were represented well in this stale government office. Represented better here than on Gilligan’s Island.
I handed the letter to John Doe office worker and said I just need a stamp on the return copy and the messenger slip. This was a tremendously confusing request to Mr. Doe. A long puzzled stare at the documents then at me then back at the documents. Then I said, do you have a received stamp? He said he’d look for one and asked which letter was for him. I said the original, the one on beige heavy stock paper with the embossed letter head at the top and the original signature in blue ink at the bottom. The copy is the other one, the one that says “copy“ on it , the one that’s a photocopy of the original which is in your other hand, the copy is the one I need a stamp on.
He went off and found Jane Doe office worker who seemed to know where there was a rubber stamp stored in the office and they discussed the task for a while before he returned appearing to be proud of himself for finding a rubber stamp. But he still couldn’t grasp the copy-received concept or which document was for him, so he handed them all back to me. I handed him back the original and left the office wondering where these people come from, how they get jobs like this, why jobs like this exist. I am confident that one intelligent motivated person could perform all duties that the 5 or 6 people in this office get paid to supposedly do.
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