Bureaucracy has a curious superpower: it can turn the simplest task into an epic exercise in frustration. Take the humble bus pass application. Your driving licence shows your age and your address. That should settle it. You’ve literally provided everything the system asks for. Yet the message pops up in all caps like a digital insult: “Cannot use driving licence for BOTH proof of age and proof of address.” A document that should suffice for two purposes is suddenly useless.
Efficiency? Out the window.
Logic? Optional.
Frustated? Definitely !
Try to open a bank account and you’ll discover that even though your passport proves who you are and your driving licence proves where you live, the bank insists you provide an additional document for your address. The one you already gave? Not enough.
Everywhere else, that passport works perfectly, including getting you access to a foreign country. Here, it’s suddenly disqualified for no reason other than procedure – “Computer says no”.
I’m told that if you try to apply for a parking permit and your driving licence is accepted for one purpose but denied for another. Attempt to register to vote or book a health appointment online, and the story repeats: documents that clearly meet the criteria are arbitrarily invalidated, leaving you staring at the screen wondering if common sense has taken an extended leave of absence. This is perhaps the real millenium bug !
Even routine tasks in daily life fall prey to this same rigid thinking. Utility companies insist on bills no older than three months, despite the obvious proof of residence in your licence or bank statements. Landlords demand multiple forms of ID and proof of address when a single document would do. The irony is striking: systems designed to verify information quickly instead slow everything down, wasting time and patience. Documents designed to multitask are forced into single-use roles. The tools that should make life simpler instead become obstacles.
And yet, the rules are unwavering. No one questions them. One document for age, one for address. One for ID, one for residence. You comply, you gather extra paperwork, you prove everything twice, because bending the rules, or trusting logic, simply isn’t permitted. The result is frustration, wasted time, and a gnawing awareness that common sense is not a requirement in these systems.
Bureaucracy rarely rewards creativity. It prizes compliance. That means the most effective strategy is carrying extra documents, accepting the absurdity, and moving on. You might win small victories by pointing out logical inconsistencies, but the larger pattern remains. Logic and efficiency are optional. Red tape is mandatory.
Questioning these rules is not rebellion, it’s sanity. When bureaucracy serves only itself, the people it exists to help are left navigating forms that defy reason, armed with nothing but patience, extra paperwork, and a driving licence that can do far more than the system will ever allow.
In the end, your driving licence is the perfect symbol of this absurdity: a document designed to verify both age and address, capable of satisfying multiple requirements, yet perpetually underused because rules insist it can only do one job at a time. A simple, practical tool becomes a cautionary tale
If you’ve ever found yourself staring at an application screen or a counter clerk, muttering “It literally shows everything you need,” you’re not alone. Bureaucracy thrives on that moment of disbelief. It doesn’t reward logic. It rewards adherence to rules that do not make sense. And until that changes, we all remain captives of forms, checkboxes, and perfectly good documents that somehow cannot be trusted to do the work they were designed for.
Arrrrrgggghhhhhhh…..
