Factotum V Functionary

Functionary: A person employed as an official in a bureaucracy who holds limited authority and primarily serves to carry out a simple function for which discretion is not required. 

One of the financial institutions that holds a portion of my father's assets has been a great big pain in the ass to deal with.  I don't think they're nefarious - I think they're lazy or incompetent or uninterested in doling back out that which they had previously harvested, perhaps a combination of the three.  I say again - the taking of the money is the easy part; it's the letting go of the money that seems to cause so much corporate and institutional heartbreak.  With this particular company I feel like I've been teleported back into the 1950s.  I imagine the phone being answered in a gloomy old building with steel desks and 20 foot ceilings and creaking, scarred wooden floors, slow-moving scriveners and factotums hidden behind reams of paper, performing mind-numbing tasks, sloth-like, while fluorescent lights shed a sickly light on the whole morass.

My point of contact has been a fittingly sluggish man back in The Old City.  He takes a day or two to respond to my messages, a response unbefitting an important functionary like me and one that sets my blood to a low boil.  He can't help me on some matters because he isn't licensed in Vacation City so he sends "urgent requests" to the home office asking them to "reach out," to "pick up the fucking phone" and "fucking call me already."  He did send me a huge collection of forms that a nuclear physicist couldn't figure out.

Silence.

Today I escalated the conflict and called the main office where a very nice woman named Tina listened sympathetically and transferred me pronto to a very nice man named Scott who quickly sucked me into his own personal institutional tar-pit.  Now I know how the sad brontosaurus (which means "thunder lizard," btw) felt 150 million years, castigating himself for wandering into a real tar pit.

Scott promised to connect me with a representative in Vacation City.  I'm beginning to think that if you want to disappear off the face of the earth, never to be heard from again, you should join this company as a representative in the Vacation City.  These people are seriously hard to locate.

I asked Scott if he could help me navigate the forms.

"I'll put them in the mail.  They will arrive in 5 to 7 business days," he intoned.

I asked Scott if he could email me the forms.

"Unfortunately, our system isn't permitting me to email attachments right now," he said.

I asked Scott if he was fucking kidding me.

"I am not fucking kidding you," he replied politely.

I thought about asking Scott if he had a smart phone.  I wanted to point out that any obstacles to emailing attachments vanished into thin air in 1996.  I wanted to point out that he had competition out there, that I could conduct my business with someone else.  This seemed self-evident to me but not to Scott. if his behavior was any indication.

I got off the phone with the implacable Scott, winner by TKO, and decided to work off my irritation by taking a walk and having a cup of coffee.  I walked; had a cup of coffee; and walked back, never quieting my mind.  I have tried to show some patience with this estate unraveling stuff - I expected some delays, inevitable with legal matters, but not to this extent.  I have tried to wait quietly.  I have decided that raising a big stink to get something done in a week instead of two weeks wasn't in my best interest, and that's the only interest that I care about.

"Hmmm," I thought.  "Why don't I pick up the phone and just call someone I choose randomly out of the phone book?"

You know, that worked really quite well.  This guy got the forms transferred from the home office and I have an appointment with him tomorrow.

I always marvel at the tension between taking an action and then having to wait patiently with not having taken all of the actions necessary to move the works forward.  I can't always discern between the two.  I was all proud of myself for practicing calm waiting - patient waiting not being one of my strong points - and here I was, needing to take more action.  I really had no idea.  I really didn't.

I'm sure this is not Round 12.