The people who enforce rules like that know that their bosses will fire them if they don’t, and I doubt that they’re paid so much that finding another job wouldn’t be a personal terror.
Politicians and pundits love to rail against government inefficiency or bureaucracy but that’s an intentional tactic to absolve the politicians who created the problem. If the law says there’s a penalty after 52 weeks, the DMV employee can’t override it unless they’re very specifically authorized to do so.
> The people who enforce rules like that know that their bosses will fire them if they don’t, and I doubt that they’re paid so much that finding another job wouldn’t be a personal terror.
It's very difficult to fire a government employee. This is because of "due process" requirements that apply specifically to the government taking something from you (in this case, a job). The due process requirements are fairly burdensome and drawn out, so often the inept employee is just shuffled off to another office or put somewhere that he has minimal impact on others.
You’re overstating the difficulty: you have to show cause and demonstrate fairness, but in the scenario we’re talking about that’s very straightforward: show that a clerk had been trained on the rules, didn’t follow them, and didn’t improve when warned.
" ... had been trained on the rules, yet interpreted them compassionately according to sober interpretation of their intent, and didn't improve when warned ... "
liquidise says the DMV recorded they received the check on time.
If that is true, and the records show what can only be explained by a clerical error - there is always a procedure to fix clerical errors. If liquidise wrote to his senator and the senator took up the cause, I guarantee the error could be corrected by an orderly and legal procedure.
Of course, whether that procedure is known to front-line workers, and whether they can do it fast enough to achieve their call processing time targets is another matter.
Oh, no doubt. My point is that you don’t rail against someone doing their job, you follow that process for getting it corrected. Like if Verizon messes up my bill, being a jerk to the call center worker won’t do much but finding a contact who actually has the ability to authorize a change does.
Politicians and pundits love to rail against government inefficiency or bureaucracy but that’s an intentional tactic to absolve the politicians who created the problem. If the law says there’s a penalty after 52 weeks, the DMV employee can’t override it unless they’re very specifically authorized to do so.