Bureaucracy

Living and working within several intersecting bureaucracies, I relish its perfect expression: frantic, absorbed futility.

This morning as I biked to an early doctor’s appointment on the other side of town, I passed several DC government employees, armed with leaf blowers and commissioned to blow leaves off the sidewalks eastwards.

Two problems:

Very few leaves have fallen yet—most of DC’s trees are still green or just starting to flame.

A fresh wind blew west, and the few leaves that had fallen—crisp, brown strips like snow pea pods—were rattling efficiently in the opposite direction of the blowers’ push.

Undeterred, the faithful DC government workers ran their blowers, staunchly spewing air into a near leafless headwind.

It was an accurate synopsis of my preceding 24 hours, in which the water to our house had been turned off, because WASA had not processed the paperwork to open an account for our house, because in their records our house was still owned in foreclosure by Countrywide, because they had not processed the paperwork to open an account for our house.