So today we will be talking about bureaucracy and in particular more specifically about

bureaucratic encounters.

And I want first to ask you what are the images that comes intuitively to mind when I say

the same term bureaucracy or when you imagine or recall your last bureaucratic encounter

or like you can even go to a typical story of encounter with any kind of bureaucratic

engagement or maybe you found yourself on the other side of the disk, namely in a bureaucratic

role and you're willing to share some of it.

So as far as I'm concerned you can open up the mic and just, you know, say what you like

just like think about immediate images and tropes that comes to mind that we all know

it's like part of sort of like vernacular social knowledge that we all share across

cultures even.

In my case the first thing I think about is that there's a lot of slow processes and

usually not so nice people.

I hear you.

Administration.

This is like first association with the word bureaucracy.

So it can be a state administration or non-state government, right?

Like any huge, any big, like big scale, large scale institution can be bureaucratic.

Okay.

So we already heard it's kind of bad, not nice people and it's slow where we would have

loved it to be so much more faster, right?

What else?

A huge paperwork.

Huge paperwork.

Slow awaiting time.

A lot of problems in coherence.

A lot of problematics with documents.

So you keep going back to the material they mentioned that is included, right, in the

very setting.

We know what we handle, what we have to give.

We really fill this paper.

Sometimes we engage with bureaucracy through government, right?

But sometimes we really have to have like packs, right?

Like stocks of paper that we have to carry.

And waiting, you know, I've been waiting for three hours, four hours, like waiting is sort

of like, it's a concept.

It is a temporal concept, right?

It has to do with how you manage your time or how others manage your time.

But it's very bodily experience, right?

Like we all have, I'm sure, experience of just waiting and waiting.

And some of us are more privileged to wait because we have more time or we are not feeling

abused with how we manage our time.

Think for example about illegal immigrants who have to wait, right?

The settings in which they are waiting is so much different than the ones I'm waiting

in when I just want things to be done in one hour and it's taking three hours.

Laura, you raised your hand.

Yes, because I work around nine years in public administration in Chile.

So I suffer the same that you are talking about, but inside the institution.

So it's all...

Are you willing to say?