Empathic bureaucrats

Dealing with government offices is often characterized as an unpleasant ordeal with long waiting times, silly procedures with a lot of holes, and a swathe of interactions with incompetent, lazy and indifferent government employees; "civil servants".

To a certain degree this has often been my experience in the countries I have resided for an extended duration; Cyprus, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, China. There are times when things seem to take forever simply because the government has underfunded the institution I am dealing with in order to be an asshole to the ones that use it, or an exception has surfaced in my case, which breaks the fine machine of bureaucracy and the civil servant abandons the case until further notice. In such cases, I would try over and over again every medium of communication I can find to get things going, and things would eventually work out. The attempts would be painful, riddled with interactions with assholes who have no interest in helping me in any way. I would get so worked up, "how can a fellow human could be so distant and indifferent to another?" Not only some of these people would be uninterested in doing their jobs but they would also seem to enjoy seeing me, a complete stranger whom they know nothing about, suffer. Over the years, I had to involve a bunch of other people whose involvement should not have been necessary to solve my problems with various government offices. These people include but are not limited to; friends, friends of friends (often some big shot in some government office 🤮), lawyers, my mom, my local member of the parliament, my employer, another government officer doing the same kind of work but from a different city/state 🙄.

Yeah dealing with bureaucrats has sucked on many occasions, but not in Norway (Oh yes Norway! 🥳). Bureaucrats in Norway can be a pain as well, but each office provides the opportunity to talk to multiple people for all occasions (based on my experience), and every time I had a problem I could always find someone willing to listen and help. Civil servants had gone out of their way to help me in many occasions. Some have even created exceptions in the system order to help me, a complete stranger whom they know nothing about, simply because common sense dictated that. I truly believe that this is not only because my stars have been aligned and that I have simply had luck on my side. True, there were bureaucrats in Japan, UK, US and Cyprus  that had also gone out of their way to help me as well, but those fine people were the exception. In Norway they are part of the norm. Not everyone in Norway is that nice of course (see Oh No Norway!) but enough of the Norwegians are to pull them out of the exception.

Following the common sense, helping those in need, equality, respect, and fellowship are not just nice to have morals that Norwegians read and hear about. The Norwegian laws are even constructed in a way to accommodate these principles; circumstances and intentions are an important part of the Norwegian law and way of life (as I interpret it) and this sacrifices certainty in law for reason (common sense).

So this post is to thank to all those wonderful human beings at UDI, St. Olavs Hospital, Miljødirektoratet, Skatteetaten, Politiet i Trøndelag, NTNU, Nokut, and other places, who listened to me (or someone important to me) and helped even though I was a complete stranger whom they knew nothing about.