Red Tape and Yellow Stickies
Great moments in building history: I'm sorry. We do not fax documents.
When I started building a house in a tiny, remote corner of nowhere, I’d heard warnings about red tape, but I pretty much ignored them. I don’t like stereotypes, especially ones about the government because I’m a fed myself, having worked several years on a trail crew for the National Park Service. Then, a couple of years ago, I started obtaining permits (building, water, septic) from the county. In the end, it wasn’t red tape that got to me. It was one yellow Post-It note.
I was convinced in the beginning that as long as I followed every rule to the letter, these county permits would, if not fly through, at least plod along. They didn’t. More than a year passed while one application in particular sat in the wrong file or was sent to the wrong office, then seemingly disappeared. One morning, I called from the one outdoor satellite phone we share in this valley, and I spent 20 minutes on hold while the receptionist searched for my file.
“What was the application year on that one again?” she asked when she finally returned.
“1999.”
“Oh,” she said, “you should have told me it’s from 1999.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s from 1999.” I felt hopeful, having cleared that up, that maybe we were getting somewhere.
“Because 1992 through 1999 are missing right now.”
“Right now today, or right now for the rest of the week, or what?”
“Just right now.”
I decided to switch gears from patient martyr to amateur sleuth. Call different county offices at different times. Call and hang up until I got a new receptionist. At last I figured out where the lost application might be. I wrote to that office (having lost some faith in the phone), and sure enough, they replied that they had the application on file. However, they explained, one necessary document was missing. I knew the document well. Three months prior, I’d taken a special trip to hand-deliver it. I got on the phone right away.
“You hand-delivered it? Then it’s at the auditor’s office.”
“Right. The county auditor’s office.”
“We don’t have it here.”
“Can you get it?”
“No,” she said. “You’ll have to do that.”
I explained that I live in a very remote area and work full time, and that I had, in fact, already taken one special trip to deliver this very same piece of paper. Was there any other possibility?
“Hmm,” she said. “You could have them fax it to us.” Couldn’t she have them fax it to her? I couldn’t be too choosy.
“Okay, can you transfer me to that office?”
“No, I am sorry,” she said, eternally polite. “Good luck.” She hung up.
I looked up the number for the auditor’s office, waited for the satellite connection and dialed the 35 numbers required to make another calling-card call. When I got through, I explained the situation to the next receptionist.
“So can you fax that document?”
“Yes, but it will cost $1.”
“Fine, fine,” I said. After all, what’s another dollar?
She paused. “Paid in advance.”
“Do you mean,” I reined in hard on my anger, trying to put on my cheeriest gritted-teeth voice, “that I have to send you a dollar before you will fax this document to an office across the street?”
“Yes,” she said.
1:15 p.m. Mail goes out of this valley at 1:30 only three times a week by boat. I’d have to hustle to jump-start this application before it got lost again. I rifled through the car and found three crumpled bills, enough to buy a prestamped envelope and to include an extra dollar for good measure.
I sprinted up the post-office steps, scribbled a note with every possible name, number or filing code under which the document might be found, folded cash into the envelope and sent off my request. A week passed. I told a few people about my exasperation with red tape, and eventually, when I calmed down, I felt ashamed. It isn’t the county’s fault I live in the backwoods, I told myself. I can’t expect special treatment. Besides, I reasoned, this is probably an oddity, a bad day (or string of them, perhaps), entirely out of the ordinary. I thought of all the times hikers have passed me on the trail while I’m eating lunch, off the clock, and how they probably thought to themselves: Ha! Lazy government worker wasting tax dollars. Stereotypes, I reminded myself, are no good.
Finally, a letter arrived postmarked from the county. Approval, I thought, feeling victorious. I had waded patiently through the muck—or mostly patiently—and now here was my reward. The envelope weighed a little less than I might have expected, but what’s there to say? I tore it open and out flew the hand-scrawled note I had written to them a week before, with one yellow Post-It note affixed, the small size, with a polite and neatly printed message: I’m sorry. We do not fax documents. The crumpled dollar bills were nowhere to be found.
—Ana Maria Spagna, Stehekin, WA
Drawing by: Jim Meehan
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