I just came across a new term (to me). It's Annoyance Economy. I looked up the meaning of the term. Annoyance economy refers to business practices that intentionally waste time and money to benefit a company: robocalls, difficulty cancelling subscriptions, unnecessary or excessive paperwork, massive delays, etc.
For example, you call your insurance company about a nixed claim, get routed through a phone tree, wait on hold 40 minutes, explain your problem to a chatbot that can't help, then start over with a human agent who asks for the same information again. By the time you hang up, you've burned an hour on what should've been a two-minute fix—and you might have to call again.
The Annoyance Economy wastes $165 billion per year. And that's just counting costs in the private business sector. If you add government annoyance, the cost is incalculable.
I work with the Social Security Administration every day as a claimant's representative. My job is to help claimants who are trying to get a benefit from Social Security. I act as an advocate and mediator between my client and the Social Security Administration. I have long viewed some of the practices of Social Security to be annoying. Now I have a name for it.
On a recent call to Social Security, I listened to a 3 minute recording of their privacy policy while I waited for someone to answer the phone. A total waste of time. Why must I listen to this lengthy tripe every time I call Social Security? Some days I call them 5 or 6 times and must listen to the same annoying, time wasting message 6 times a day--or 30 times a week. Especially aggravating when you have limited time to do your job and just need a one minute conversation with a government employee. Why not just answer the phone? I wonder if this delay is just for the sake of delay.
When I get a one page form from Social Security, it always includes 2 or 3 extra pages explaining their privacy policies and the Paperwork Reduction Act. (Printing and mailing 4 pages instead of 1 page is "paperwork reduction)? How many times do I need to see that same policy in print? I probably get this same notice 300 times a year. (They go in my wastebasket). How much does it cost the government to print millions of those papers that, I'm guessing, almost nobody reads or even bothers to glance at? They fill landfills all across America. They help nobody.
You say: Well, there must be a law requiring those notices. Perhaps, but is that law just part of the Annoyance Economy? Should it be changed? What all of this amounts to is delay, inefficiency, time wasting, more costs to taxpayers and--worst of all--horrible delays in providing benefits to eligible claimants. My main gripe is that there are claimants eating dog food and doing without medicine while Social Security makes sure that we all know about their privacy policies and "paperwork reduction" efforts.
This is perhaps an unavoidable component of bureaucracy--where an enormous government agency loves its paperwork, forms, notices, announcements, processes and delays more than making timely decisions on claims that have been waiting for months or years--with all the accompanying human suffering that is entailed.
Ask any politician and they will nearly universally agree that Social Security is inefficient, overtly slow and lagging behind in just about every category of service. But they also agree that that nothing can be done about it; at least, it won't be.
The government is finally taking notice of the annoyance economy in private business. Perhaps one day it will turn its attention to federal agencies that engage in the same perpetual annoyance.
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