Today is Black Friday. I am left wondering where the week went. I have had a number of difficulties. First, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) sent me an email to announce they had a communication for me. This communication was only available on a specific CRA web site.
When I logged in, I was directed to a second page which requested a secret CRA code. This secret code had been mailed to me over a year ago. I had no idea it was needed for each access of the CRA web site; I had disposed of the code.
When I called the CRA help line, the agent refused to acknowledge my identity. I attempted to use the set of five challenge / response authentication security questions created when first generating the CRA web account. The agent said none of these were of any use. I had to supply a detail from line X of a past years tax return. I have no idea where that tax return might be, or even if I kept it. My life collapses under a weight of paper I am incapable of managing. I asked the CRA to simply send to my mailing address the text of the message the CRA was attempting to communicate. The agent informed me this was not possible as I had failed to properly identify myself. At that point I blew up in frustration. The tax people have my mailing address on file. I call in to ask that they please send something to me that they claim is addressed to me, and they refuse to do this. This is the most bizarre communication system imaginable. Only an inbred government bureaucracy has the power to create something so stunningly inefficient and backward.
The week went downhill from there.
The message likely concerns my tax refund. This year I cashed in $5,000 worth of RRSP retirement savings, the bank withheld a big chunk of this money, and I have been counting on the return of this big chunk to pay the bills. So I suddenly find myself short and lacking an identity.
I have had a great difficulty writing the submission to TAQ. It was easier to write letters of complaint to the Government of Canada. I have been trying to understand the reason for this difference. I suspect it has to do with the fact that in my submissions to TAQ, I am endlessly repeating variations on the same theme. I believe the insurer has refused the claim out of wilful ignorance. If they choose to ignore modern science then there exists no grounds for a claim. It is as if they were members of the Flat Earth Society and refuse to acknowledge your lost luggage claim because to them, and their flat earth maps, the West Indies simply do not exist. There is nothing past the Greenwich meridian. So your lost luggage claim gets the jackboot. It is very, very, very, difficult to engage in rational argument with persons who are deliberately obtuse for the simple reason it suits their economic purpose.
In dealing with the insurer, I am in the same position as a black man in the 1930’s deep south. The insurer keeps knocking me down, I keep making the claim that I am a human being who has suffered an injury, the insurer knocks me down again and refuses to acknowledge the evidence I present. Blacks just don’t have rights. To even presume to raise a claim to basic human rights is sufficient grounds for a lynching.
I have also come to the realization that part of my malaise has to do with the loss of self, the forced change in identity brought on by the injury. I dislike the me that that forgets things, that makes the same mistake over and over, that is unable to function for more than four hours at a time, that generates errors in comprehension such that documents require days of repetitive recursive review, the fact that even when I concentrate on not making mistakes I still introduce error. I simply fail to recognize the error until a much later date.