Content:
Hook: Lost in the maze of the administration, a citizen remains stranded for three months, unable to obtain a simple driver’s license. A journey into the Kafkaesque absurdity of public service.
The extraordinary case of Mr. Dupont, an honest citizen, has become the perfect illustration of the infernal labyrinth that administration can sometimes turn out to be. Mr. Dupont, in his sixties, simply set out to renew his driver’s license. Three months later, he is still waiting, chasing after documents lost in the twists and turns of public services, despite his consistent efforts to comply with administrative requirements.
The story began when Mr. Dupont went to the local driver’s license office to submit his application. After providing all the required documents, he was informed that he needed to provide an additional form, the infamous ‘Form X72bis’ which, of course, was not mentioned on the initial list of required documents.
Mr. Dupont then embarked on an endless quest to find and fill out the precious document. Every office he visited sent him to another, every agent he met was sure they were not the right contact for the infamous form. “The most absurd part is that each office I visited was located on the other side of town from the previous one. It seemed like they wanted to put as many kilometers as possible between me and that form. At one point, I was almost convinced the form was just a myth!” laments Mr. Dupont.
Mr. Dupont’s Kafkaesque situation is much more than an anachronism in our modern age, with its frantic technologies. It is a revealing caricature of our institutions, a mirror held up to our administration that often seems more inclined to lose the citizen in a maze of complexities than to make their lives easier. Let us not forget this apocryphal quote attributed to Kafka himself: “The labyrinth of administration is a gigantic machine, whose builder no one remembers, how it works, or how to escape it.”
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