KZBlog

Today our Mystery Citizen tries out the Department for Pension Registration and Individual Social Cards of the Republic of Kazakhstan and finds that despite its long experience, it has failed to master even the basics of the bureaucratic experience.

Pluses: Difficult to find, Have to sign your name on some log at the very end for no reason, time spent to size of paper received ratio pretty high.

Minuses: Cheerful and helpful staff, clear instructions, process is quick and efficient.

Total Time spent: 45 minutes. Disappointing.

In short Miss it unless you’re a first-timer to bureaucracy

---

Mystery Citizen was encouraged by the long, unwieldy name and its inability to reduce to a snappy or memorable acronym. The office is also tucked away behind a new apartment-shopping complex in an obscure part of town which makes it pleasantly difficult to find. As many of the younger bureaucracies are starting to realize, to really enhance the annoyance of the full bureaucratic experience, it’s good for one building to have separate entrances that don’t connect to each other for each office to ensure that the patron will wander around for a long time, trying to find the right place. The entrance was very well thought out, as it is up a set of rickety iron steps cleverly disguised as a fire exit, ensuring that the patron will try this entrance only as a last resort. It’s a nice touch that having entered the building, one must go up two more flights of steps, glimpsing long, unoccupied corridors of anonymous doors filled with bad linoleum and poor lighting. Unfortunately when one arrives on the 4th floor, one finds the ambience shattered.

The walls are well and evenly painted, and brightly decorated with advertisements of different pension funds. The true connoisseur might search for some sign of corruption—perhaps only state pension funds are advertised—but would be disappointed by the fair nature of the advertisements, not to mention the clearly presented information on each and variety of decoration lending a jarringly unpleasant cheery air to the establishment. This was the first—not the last—time this reviewer would be shocked by the DPRIS’ inability to provide even the simplest discomforts of the official experience. Strike One!

The mass of people already assembled well before opening time was encouraging, but this is par for the course in a bureaucracy and this mass was far too well organized, not to mention energetic and hopeful looking. An office really needs to work hard to attract the right crowd of the despondent, hopeless, and beaten-down. Strike Two; DPRIS has some real work ahead of itself.

Upon hearing that there were 3 windows available for service, Mystery Citizen almost walked out. Really, these days, an office haunted by one apparatchik who refuses to let more than one person in at a time is the basic going out experience that any citizen would expect. Three windows is far too extravagant. Plus the experienced eye notes that the crowd divided by three windows is pretty small; I’ll be lucky to dragged around uselessly here for more than half an hour. When the doors opened on time, and the servers were already in place with their windows open, I knew this would be a complete waste of time.

Mystery Citizen will note that rather than the windows opening on the spacious corridor, there is an arbitrary wall between the corridor and the windows forcing everyone to pack into a space of 12 feet by 3 feet. I am also pleased to report that order did break down and we were treated to a nice round of pushing and shoving, in which elbows, shoulders and feet were well in use. A few hapless cries of “Stay in line!” were encouraging music.

But they managed to ruin that little hope: once the doors opened I could also see clear instructions posted on which documents were needed, and this list did not deviate from the instructions we got when we called. Completely inexcusable, especially since the list was short, and did not include paying at a bank two miles away. Once again, the simplest part of any bureaucratic experience, mastered by even the humblest of offices, had been completely ignored. Fourth Strike—they’re already beyond out!

We note with disappointment that the line moved quickly, the attendant was cheerful and explained everything clearly. Really, we have come to expect bitter old illiterate apparatchiks close to the retirement age with no motivation to work and this chipper young woman with clear Russian, willing to repeat herself without a trace of annoyance in her voice, dressed I might add, in a nice fashionable top was yet another Big Strike Number Five!

There was one nice moment: the manager came over and our server shut the window, pulled out a big binder and began agonizingly going through papers one by one to find the right one. However, this interruption only lasted a minute—we hope her manager will put her back on training to teach her how to string these things out until people start banging on the window.

Once at the window, there was some pushing and shoving to establish my place, but again the server showed her inexperience by reaching out her hands for documents instead of letting the patrons duke it out futilely. She also typed information in much too quickly and gave the form to fill out in under a minute. I’ve given up handing out strikes; at this point they might as well hire an IT manager and an efficiency expert, so low have they fallen.

The form itself was clearly designed by an idiot: easy to fill out, truly awful clear questions, and unappetizing spaces that matched the size of the answer. It was so repulsively straightforward I was able to fill it on the back in Kazakh; one nice touch, the attendant had failed to say if I needed to fill it out in both languages (this silver lining was quickly tarnished: I didn’t). Then our server had the audacity to let us return to her window without a line, gave clear instructions on how to correct the form, and let us correct it right there and then on the same paper–Bureaucracy kindergarten: If a patron doesn’t fill out the same form five times, you aren’t giving your all to service! This citizen saw no signs of arbitrariness, since he managed to get the form right the first time. I was just praying I would get out of there soon, and disgustingly enough, it looked like I was.

Sure enough the line for the next window to get the card (having two windows was a feeble attempt to win back some of my respect) went quickly and in no time I had a card in my hand. The real sign that DSPRISC has failed to do the right thing by its patrons came at the end: This reviewer was shocked to see patrons congratulating each other. If a place has the right ambience, the right touches in place, it should come off on the patrons. The fact that people are coming out of there cheerful and healthy looking is the most scathing criticism I can give.

Overall rating: One broken manual typewriter