Things can always be worse

The title pretty well sums up my thoughts lately. No matter what bump in the road my life might hit, things are never as bad as they might be. Work has really been driving that home lately, and it's seriously depressing.

I've spent the past few days working on a couple of projects that have shown me just how much things can suck. One is looking at foreclosures in the area and some of the scummy ways that businesses (one specifically) targeted people with poor credit and set them up so that at the slightest hiccup in their payments, they were pounced upon, their investment taken away, their house ripped out from under them, and then taken to court to extract even more money from their straining pocketbook. All of this happening after the business assured the homebuyer that they should trust the business, that they would take care of them, that they shouldn't read the contract too closely because the company was taking care of it all for them - and the language that let this all happen to the homebuyer was right there in the contract if they had taken the time to read it.

The other project I can't say much about, since it's still under embargo for another month, but it deals explicitly with the health of kids and implicitly with the health of everyone. It focuses on the failure of government to accurately report information on conditions that could lead to health problems, and it's been going on for many years now. If the people that work for us - the government - aren't doing their job to take care of the people, then who will? It makes me wonder if government has forgotten that it actually does work for the people, not for the businesses and corporations of the country that can make the most noise and shovel the most money into Washington and state capitols across the country.

What these stories have reminded me off is that, much like tech support, journalism is not the place to be if you want to maintain a high opinion of humanity. Sure, we see feel good stories and play them up, but for the most part news is about tragedy, corruption, betrayal, pain, suffering and the people that inflict all of that on others. We get to see up close just what it is that people are capable of in more gory depth and detail than we can adequately convey in stories. Something like the housing deal just doesn't have the same impact in a story that you get from talking to the victims, in looking at more than a hundred court cases of people being evicted and seeing the swift, brutal way in which they were kicked out of their homes for missing even a single payment at times.

Which brings me to another point - why the heck does the court system here make their Web site so horrifically difficult to access? Since they already have the information in a database, it shouldn't be a challenge to get a copy of what I'm looking for in electronic format. And yet to do so required me talking to 6 different people over 4 hours before finally being told that any such "bulk" request for records would require a formal Sunshine Law request being sent to the State Judicial Records Committee to be reviewed and, if approved, acted upon.

Seriously? They're already available on the Web and stored in a database. It's going to take them weeks to put together an SQL statement that says "SELECT * FROM cases_table WHERE plaintiff = Company Name"? OMG - that just took me a whole 5 seconds to write! And it might take another 4 minutes to process that request and have the results written to a CSV file... maybe... if the computer is really, REALLY slow. But no, they can't do that. They have to muck it all up in bureaucratic red tape that ends up in me transcribing it all by hand (Yay for copy/paste!) simply to get the data we need in a reasonable amount of time rather than waiting until sometime next month, if we're lucky, to get results back.

And so, to get through just under 150 records, it's taken me a day and a half - yes, A DAY AND A HALF! - to go through and copy/paste the data. They managed to make their Web interface so damnably difficult to get through that getting a single record transcribed has been taken between 2 and 10 minutes, since you have to click through, resubmit the form, click through again, copy, resubmit the form, copy, repeat ad naseum... BARF! I swear, they must have hired the BOFH to design that system with the goal of making it so difficult to get through that users would never come back. Their motto should be "Case.Net: Using obfuscation and hindrance to keep public records difficult to access since we started!"