GoKawiilMood: Maliciously compliant.
I can't express how much I utterly hate the "Continuing Disability Review."
It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: "Are you still disabled?"
As if my blindness were a seasonal allergy. As if I might have woken up last Tuesday, blinked, and realized that my optic nerves had decided to regenerate spontaneously.
This week, I received The Letter. It demanded "updated medical evidence" to prove that I—a man who has been blind since birth—am, in fact, still blind.
I called the number. I navigated the phone tree hellscape. I finally reached a human being. Let’s call her "Karen from Compliance."
"I have the documents in PDF format," I told her, using my polite, I haven't had my morning tea so make this easy on me, voice. "I can email them to you right now. You’ll have them in ten seconds."
"We cannot accept email," Karen said. Her voice was flat, dry, and sounded like stale coffee and rigid adherence to a rulebook written in 1994. "It is a security risk. You must mail physical copies, or you can fax them."
"Fax them?" I asked. "You want me to fax you medical records when you could just delete the email after saving the attachments?"
"Those are the options, sir. If we don't receive them by Friday, your benefits will be suspended."
... continue reading