Doing battle with the system

This week I have been doing battle with bureaucracy, on three fronts no less.

If I simply say, Ryanair customer service, your heart immediately goes out to me.

That was the first front. Jacqui and I were due to have a few days away in Riga but, sadly, the daughter travelling out with us suddenly contracted shingles — an eventuality covered by our travel insurance.

Some interesting info for you.  You cannot cancel your flights on Ryanair, which seems strange.  Instead, if you are claiming on your travel insurance, you simply wait for the flights to have taken place and then request a No show letter.   Thankfully, for us, this was just a few days wait.

In applying for this letter, I used a combination of ChatGPT and screenshots to take me to the correct page on the Ryanair website.

Then there was the application for the insurance payout. I already knew from someone in insurance that the relevant form is designed to be unnecessarily long and detailed to discourage you from completing it. I’m surprised they didn’t ask for my O-level results — but I relished the challenge.

Second battle.

We’ve had solar panels fitted but, to be paid for the electricity we feed into the grid, I needed a DNO letter as well as an MCS certificate. Like you, I had no idea what these were — which meant, in the first place, pushing the company which did the installation, a national and highly recommended firm.

This involved several phone calls and — as you now suspect — waiting to be put through while listening to countless repetitions of some jingle.

However, for the DNO letter they themselves needed to push another bureaucracy — which effectively quadruples the effort required.

Eventually I decided to do the pushing myself and, again thanks to ChatGPT, discovered that the relevant DNO provider was not Electricity North West but — of course — Scottish Power. After a few false dawns, I found myself speaking with Aidan, who was hugely helpful.

As was Hanna at Lancashire County Council.

In fact, the Council’s Social Services Department has been excellent in its support for Jacqui, both through Mere Brook daycare centre and the provision of personal care.

However, the Department’s relationship with County Finance appears somewhat sporadic, with the result that I was sent a large bill for services I was already paying for by Direct Debit.

Sorting this out took about three hours of my time, working my way through the various options on my phone. It seemed virtually impossible to speak to a human being — any human being. Following one unsuccessful phone call, I counted 25 digits on my phone, each one representing an option I had been asked to select.

Eventually, somehow, I got through to Hannah in Finance who, like Aidan, was determined to help me, even phoning back the next day to reassure me that the problem had been fixed.

The problem is not the people; the problem is the system. And that’s life today, even with the guidance and support of ChatGPT.

As the Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt observed: “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances.”

Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933, initially settling in France and later moving to the United States. She became deeply concerned with the way large, impersonal systems can make individual responsibility disappear. Her observation rang true for me this week: the problem was not the people; the problem was the system.

The apostle Paul would understand that. He describes Sin not simply as individual wrongdoing but as something larger — a power which infects and distorts human life. As he writes to the church in Ephesus, "For our^[ struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:12)

But people like Hanna and Aidan can still make a difference.

And as I write this, I must highlight one young woman — I don’t know her name — employed by Serco, the private company contracted by the Home Office to house and support asylum seekers.

Working just down the road in a difficult environment and within what can easily become a dehumanising system, I have heard several reports of her kindness and her willingness to go the second mile to help.

And that’s our calling as Christians.

We may not be able to dismantle every system or untangle every bureaucracy, but we can refuse to let it make us less human. We can notice the person in front of us, take responsibility when it would be easier to pass them on, and go that second mile.

This is how God’s kingdom so often comes — not through grand gestures, but through ordinary people choosing kindness when the system makes kindness difficult.

Because when system loses sight of the person, the Christian calling is simple: make sure we don’t