from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

It is interesting how many encounters I have with the state of the general form: X: "You must submit Y regarding a company [that no longer exists]." Me: "That company no longer exists." "You are legally required to submit it anyhow." *sigh, 15 minutes of paperwork*

Me: "Let me try this again: We totes do not exist." X: "Thank you for your cooperation in the important mission of..."

I really hope that X does not use the phone number they forced me to provide to enquire for further detail on what non-existence means. (Meaning, in addition to the maximum of 1,000 characters I wrote to try to dodge that phone call.)

Also that PDF thing is not an accident; a lot of the government modernization apps explicitly ride on the paper-based rails established previously, to the point where they are complicated, bespoke workflows for PDF generation and submission versus mere data entry.

Including, in at least one case, "The app that generates the PDF is bugged so download it, hand edit it in Adobe whatever, then re-upload it to the portal so that we can read the non-bugged response. Thanks so much." (They did not actually say Thanks, but did say the rest.)