(Opinion) To be magically transported into the strange, surreal, fantastic, and nonsensical Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit into his burrow.
While rabbit holes abound, all we have to do today is look around us to discover that somehow, we have all been transported to our own dystopian ‘wonderlands’ where the bureaucracy’s incursions into our freedoms are taken for granted and ‘weird’ has become the natural descriptor for our own world.
Just last week, I was forced to ask if the triumph of bureaucracy over our sanity is irreversible, and should we just give in, too tired or bored with engaging in another fight we are unlikely ever to win?
Are we like Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to engage in an endless losing struggle against bureaucracy, the essential absurdity of modern existence?
Let me give you an example.
I thought I was going nuts recently when ten minutes prior to my release from the Mirantes part of the excellent BP hospital group in São Paulo, a young woman came into the room and said that I had to be “moved to a room”.
When I politely but humorously expressed the view that the space in which I had spent the last twenty-four hours and was about to vacate was a ‘room’, she demurred.
“This is not a room,” she insisted, obviously feeling confident of the power of the bureaucracy to support her absurdity.
Long experience has taught me that in situations such as this, the rational argument never works.
The best way to get past these obdurate bureaucratic obstacles is to play at surrealism. By making others think you are crazy, they can often see themselves in this funhouse mirror and even share the joke.
“Forgive me,” I said. “But you must know that I have been diagnosed as insane, which explains why I think this is a ‘room’. “So, help me please”, I pleaded.”
Pointing to the wall behind me, I asked: “Is this a wall?” She nodded her head in the affirmative.
Then pointing to each of the other walls, I asked the same question, even the one with the door, where I commented that she must have had a way to come through that wall into the room.
Then pointing at the ceiling with its light fixture, I inquired if it were a ceiling, and at the floor, unable to contain myself, I asked: “Isn’t that a floor which happily keeps us all from falling into hell?”
“So, isn’t this a room”? I finally asked.
Unable to endure anymore, perhaps fearful of the maniac asking these inane questions, she left without a word, no doubt returning to wherever the bureaucrats hang out and plan their next forays into the real world.
The truth is, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her and something of an ass for my rudeness in subjecting her to my theatrics and introducing a contrarian view to fight with her bureaucratic certainty.
But I felt it essential to send a message.
Why did the bureaucracy insist on this in the first place and send the poor woman on such an obviously weird mission?
The only reasonable answer was that having kept me, not in a normal hospital room with its own bathroom and shower for which they had a mighty daily ‘pacote’ charge of R$3.154.
No!
I had perfectly reasonably been kept in an examination room without first-class amenities such as a new toothbrush but with everything necessary for examinations, which was why I was there.
Not surprisingly, the cost of that room must be considerably lower.
Perhaps this also explains the six visits, one waking me up sometime late at night by two well-meaning bureaucrats wishing to discuss payment for my stay.
Rather strangely, they were at it even before I knew that the stay was likely to end the next morning.
Some algorithm built from my date of birth, my mother’s maiden name, my CPF and doctor’s name, and whether or not I had ever had diabetes – questions having been asked, answered, and computerized half a dozen times – must have empowered them to make each visit to ask the same questions.
I fantasized that they would be blocking the exit door with their credit card machine guns at the ready were I to try to escape pre-payment.
The rabbit holes of bureaucracy have come to mean stumbling into a bizarre and disorienting alternate reality.
Once confronted with it, we can either simply accept the absurdity of it all, throw in the towel, so to speak, or push back as hard as we can.
I was ready to put the craziness behind me when I received an email from Yasmin calling my attention to “outstanding balances of R$2,042.87 to be settled in your name”.
Bureaucracies are never programmed to deal with subtleties.
I had to admire their diligence in succeeding in finding a ‘room’, to charge me for, even though their emissary had insisted that I had not stayed in one.
So, for some unexplained reason, the system wanted to charge not for one but for two nights in a room they said didn’t exist.
No way! Sometimes we must climb out of the rabbit hole and push back.
Hard!