Hey friendos! Before we start today, it was pointed out to me that there was no link to the YouTube video I presented last week. I made another technical error and found out you can’t embed YouTube videos in an email. Oops! Here’s the link in case you haven’t watched it yet: https://youtu.be/7YAkeG7aJlk?si=qtobO9zg1wY9Sd36. OK that’s all, let’s get into it!
How am I doing?
I’m doing great now but I had a hell of a week. I spent 4 whole days wading through administrative slog. France is a very bureaucratic nation and loves outdated processes.
Free, My Ass!
Let me just illustrate what I had to do to unsubscribe from the (terrible) internet provider Free.
- Find esoteric information only accessible via connecting directly to my router.
- Use that information to log into the Free website.
- Go into a submenu of a submenu that’s already hard to find.
- Click on an unsubscribe button there to reveal a… phone number?
- Call the phone number be put on hold for at least 10 minutes.
- The aggressive person on the other side of the line tries to talk you out of unsubscribing by throwing in completely unwanted services.
- Convince them you REALLY want to unsubscribe.
- They tell you to wait for 3 business days? For no reason?
- Then after those 3 days they activate a QR code in that same submenu of a submenu you have to download.
- You can use that QR code to send back your router and it’s thousands of completely unnecessary accessories. I’ve had routers with just a power plug and a fiber plug, but this thing is already a tangled snake nest.
- Get this, you then have to send a priority letter by post, telling them you REALLY want to unsubscribe. Priority letters cost about 6 euros.
- You then still have to wait 10 days after reception to have your service unplugged. Depending if you’re fast enough you still have to pay a bunch of money for reasons never explained.
Also everything is in French and there’s no option for other languages in any of these menus, even though France has millions of immigrants who haven’t learned the language yet.
Who forces people to pay to go through the labyrinth of Minos just to be able to cease using their shitty services? The irony of the company’s name is not lost on me. And this was only one of the administrative processes I had to deal with last week.
Administrative Horror
A friend of mine, Callum, postulates the existence of a monstrous filing cabinet underneath the catacombs of Paris. There, bureaucrats feed it an endless supply of paperwork drenched in the agony of its signees, for fear that if they don’t… it might awaken and destroy the city. Ridiculous as that sounds, it does feel like that sometimes, because there’s no real reason to make administration so hard.
Our society not only allows this to happen, it’s built on it. For me, it was already infuriating and anxiety-inducing and that was just for changing internet providers. Imagine if a similar process could get you deported. Many people rack up thousands in debt because of this kind of bullshit. Your whole life can get uprooted just because you don’t understand legal speak, don’t own a copier, or sent something to the wrong address. Tiny mistakes like that are easily made and can have grave consequences.
So that made me think… Is there room for Administrative Horror as a genre of fiction? It touches on similar emotions: anxiety, uncertainty, frustration, and even fear in some cases. Themes related to administration can be quite scary already: identity theft, shady contracts, crippling debt, institutional power, inheritance drama, the list goes on!
What am I doing?
So yeah, last week I had little time to do any actual work. That being said, as a little treat I rewarded myself with doing some game design prototyping. It’s one of those things that relaxes me. A great Sunday morning looks like this: a hot pot of coffee, rain in the background, chill music, and my desk full of cards, dice, and colored markers.
I worked on a little dice game I talked about with a friend of mine. The concept is to change the faces of each die to strategic effects. Controlled randomness has always been one of my favorite types of gameplay. Rolling dice specifically is playful and tactile and visualizes probability in a way that’s easy to understand for people who are not into math. The prototype was fun enough for me to play 9 runs (about 5 hours total) and only put it down because I had to do other work.
Why am I doing? (this)
I don’t really have anything particularly philosophical to say this week. If anything, I’d love to see Administrative Horror become a trope, because maybe then society will shine some light on improving outdated processes like the one I describe above!
Right now, there are not necessarily any story ideas popping up in my head, but I do think there’s space for it. It’s something we all have to deal with and nobody likes it. I don’t know of any stories that exploit it as a work of horror at all! Do you know any stories like that? If not, would you have any ideas that come to mind? Let me know on Discord! Don’t worry, it’s not one of those servers with thousands of channels and people, it’s just 20 of us and we like talking about this kind of stuff <3
I hope you have a great week!