Re:A police dog who cried drugs at every traffic stop
by arp242 on Monday May 17, 2021 @09:22PM
(#27190326)
This is kind of true for any organisation, not just governments. A few years ago I got screwed pretty royally by a rental agency after leaving for essentially no other reason than that they didn't like me objecting to their illegal actions[1], but what do you do? Okay, I can go to the small claims court or something, but it's time-consuming, potentially costly, and most of all: stressful and emotionally draining.
I don't tend to stay angry for very long. Actually, I pretty much never do. But it's hard to describe the amount of anger one can feel when being the victim of such a blatant bad faith injustice. I never thought I was capable of this, but turns out I am. These people tried to charge me for fixing cracks in the walls because the building had subsided. Yes, really. They literally admitted in the email that they knew this was illegal but were going to try it anyway (and there's a lot more bad faith bullshit in similar fashion). Eventually I got the £2,800 charge down to £800-something after filling a dispute. There was still a bunch of outright bullshit in there (about £200 at the most was justified), but is those £600 worth it?
If you can afford it: probably not. Aside from the time you need to spend on it you just get consumed by anger and negativity. It's not healthy for me, so I just moved on and tried to forget about it. I still get angry when thinking about it though; what bunch of morally bankrupt tosspots.
I've seen this with other people as well; years ago one of my coworkers had a similar conflict with his garage. I don't even know if he was right, but he certainly had the same feeling as I had. He did go to court for it (I don't recall the outcome) and he spent months talking about it to anyone who wanted to listen, including customers (many customers). I don't think it was good for him.
Ideally, government should be better than some random company. But in reality, government and companies are both organisations comprised of the same sort of people, and people can be rather ugly and unreasonable.
I do think you can minimize these sort of things by fostering a good organisational culture, which is easier said than done of course. You will always have some problems, but a lot of the truly outrageously bad problems seem to stem from a toxic culture: the culture at my rental agency, or the culture at the police in the US, or stuff like the toxic culture at the Dutch tax service leading to the recent/on-going scandal regarding false allegations of fraud and ignoring of evidence there was actually no fraud.[2]
[1]: They also evicted me over this, turns out that calling your landlord a cunt over entering your house without ringing the doorbell is not a good idea in a country with minimal protections for renters, even though it was quite justified considering it's 100% unacceptable and illegal and I had already told them many times I didn't want it.
I don't tend to stay angry for very long. Actually, I pretty much never do. But it's hard to describe the amount of anger one can feel when being the victim of such a blatant bad faith injustice. I never thought I was capable of this, but turns out I am. These people tried to charge me for fixing cracks in the walls because the building had subsided. Yes, really. They literally admitted in the email that they knew this was illegal but were going to try it anyway (and there's a lot more bad faith bullshit in similar fashion). Eventually I got the £2,800 charge down to £800-something after filling a dispute. There was still a bunch of outright bullshit in there (about £200 at the most was justified), but is those £600 worth it?
If you can afford it: probably not. Aside from the time you need to spend on it you just get consumed by anger and negativity. It's not healthy for me, so I just moved on and tried to forget about it. I still get angry when thinking about it though; what bunch of morally bankrupt tosspots.
I've seen this with other people as well; years ago one of my coworkers had a similar conflict with his garage. I don't even know if he was right, but he certainly had the same feeling as I had. He did go to court for it (I don't recall the outcome) and he spent months talking about it to anyone who wanted to listen, including customers (many customers). I don't think it was good for him.
Ideally, government should be better than some random company. But in reality, government and companies are both organisations comprised of the same sort of people, and people can be rather ugly and unreasonable.
I do think you can minimize these sort of things by fostering a good organisational culture, which is easier said than done of course. You will always have some problems, but a lot of the truly outrageously bad problems seem to stem from a toxic culture: the culture at my rental agency, or the culture at the police in the US, or stuff like the toxic culture at the Dutch tax service leading to the recent/on-going scandal regarding false allegations of fraud and ignoring of evidence there was actually no fraud.[2]
[1]: They also evicted me over this, turns out that calling your landlord a cunt over entering your house without ringing the doorbell is not a good idea in a country with minimal protections for renters, even though it was quite justified considering it's 100% unacceptable and illegal and I had already told them many times I didn't want it.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...