Bureaucracy is so baffling that it can be funny—until of course it isn’t. Millions of people rely on public assistance to make ends meet. When rent, medical insurance, and personal dignity are in the balance, absurdity stops being comical and starts being terrifying.

I spent eight months as a volunteer receptionist at a publicly funded anti-poverty agency, observing how my coworkers did their jobs.

The popular conception of bureaucracy is familiar. There are of course the rules: innumerable, entangled, often impenetrable. There are the people, the infamous bureaucrats. They are the supposedly human face of the state—cold, distant, unconcerned.

While working there, I learned that the routine of everyday work at the front lines of public service is not quite what it seems from the outside. It is neither as simple, repetitive, nor rule-governed as one might believe. If frontline work is soul-sucking, it is less because bureaucrats must mechanically apply rules than because they must shoulder, day in and day out, the weight of difficult discretionary decisions which most people have the luxury to ignore.

Read the full article on bureaucracy by Bernardo Zacka at The Atlantic