SAT
Something happened today
It reminded me of the hitchhiker joke. You have already been beaten up by the situation and then the truck driver basically says, Boy, it just ain’t your day. The laugh was useful because it exposed the design problem. Systems routinely put the heaviest procedural burden on the person with the least power over what happened. That does not mean procedures are unnecessary. Fraud claims need verification. Privacy matters. Companies cannot simply hand account information to whoever asks.
I thought about how much easier a process would feel if the people designing it began with the experience of someone whose money had been taken without permission. That person didn’t choose to create a billing dispute or a privacy question. Yet they might now be expected to understand a maze of support routes before any meaningful correction could begin.
I tried imagining the dispute from the customer's side of the counter, where the event has already happened and the remedy remains hypothetical. Somebody says to gather evidence, make another contact, follow the next instruction. Each request may make sense inside a procedure. Together they can feel like a whole new occupation assigned to a person who never applied for it.
It reminded me of other experiences with organizations, and the resemblance made the absurdity easier to recognize. The procedural work wasn't necessarily malicious; often it was the accumulated result of rules made for different purposes. But the human effect was still real. A system can be orderly from the inside and exhausting from the outside. I wanted to remember that as a customer, as an advocate, and whenever I designed something meant to help people.
Once the charge had happened, the practical work began: identify the records, understand the process, prepare the messages, and decide which questions still needed answers. I could feel how easy it would be to spend all my energy proving that the situation shouldn’t have happened. That might be true, but it didn’t change the present task.
At the same time, I wanted to avoid treating persistence as a guarantee. Being careful and determined gives me a better chance of responding well; it does not put me in control of an institution’s decision. That was uncomfortable, but it helped me distinguish my work from the result I hoped for.
I wasn’t arguing that safeguards should vanish. Verification matters, particularly when financial and personal information is involved. My question was whether the steps actually served that protective purpose or had become obstacles maintained because they fitted the institution’s internal structure. The more I looked, the more I wanted to separate the person trying to help from the rules they had been given. That was the same question about humanity inside systems, arriving again in a new costume.
But there is a design question hiding underneath all of that: How much work are you requiring from the person who is already dealing with the harm? That is the kind of question I want a new project to ask. Not because every company is evil. Because systems can become absurd without anybody waking up in the morning intending to be absurd. The truth laugh points at the absurdity. Then reporting asks how it got there.
