Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve. Every institution I have any faith in — the NHS, courts, universities, the BBC at its better moments — is one I would describe as slow, expensive and frequently maddening to deal with. And every organisation I have found genuinely pleasant to interact with is one I do not trust at all. Banks with lovely apps. Airlines with brilliant booking flows. Delivery companies that know exactly where my parcel is. I do not think this is a coincidence and I am not sure it is a paradox either. Institutions that owe you something have to be procedural, because the procedure is the accountability, and procedure is slow and irritating by nature. Companies that owe you nothing can afford to be delightful, because delight is cheap when there is no obligation underneath it. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question: when someone says a public service should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because the pleasant part and the unaccountable part might be the same part.
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@taraj i think this romanticises friction. Plenty of institutional slowness protects the institution rather than you, and it is very comfortable to call that accountability when you are the one inside it.
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something you reckon. a gripe, a hunch, a hill you will die on. serious or not.
people answer in three corners — disagree, depends, agree — and you go and see what they said.
small on purpose. you will need a code from someone already here.
what all this does to your head, and what to do about it.