I must have a twisted mind .. reading Seth Godin’s story about a 90-year-old lady (I figured she must be around that having been a bank customer for 70 years) in the bank reminds me of an article about infants caught up in the “no-fly” confusion…  hm… what do the nice old lady and the babies have in common? They are victims of mindless, clueless “due process”. 

The lady in Seth’s story (read it!) has been a customer at her bank for 70 years, comes in every week, sees the same teller for 20 years, yet has her  signature checked against a master signature card every single time.  If the same old lady goes to a corner grocery store (that is if there’s one left in her neighborhood…) I am sure she gets a very personal treatment and perhaps could have her purchases ‘added to the tab’ to be paid once a month, like in ‘good old times’  – but that’s because the small business owner can actually THINK and make his/her own decisions, do what makes sense and keeps the customer happy… apparently all the bank teller cares about is to follow due process. 

Ingrid Sanden’s 1-year-old daughter was stopped in Phoenix before boarding a flight home to Washington at Thanksgiving. Sarah Zapolsky and her husband had a similar experience last month while departing from Dulles International Airport outside Washington. An airline ticket agent told them their 11-month-old son was on the government ‘No-Fly”  list. According to the article 89 children , 14 of which were under the age 2 have been stopped as “suspicious”.   Now, for sanity’s sake let’s assume the TSA agents did not quite believe the infants were terrorists … they still went through the full process, getting passports faxed, background checks.. etc, before releasing the children – the followed ‘due process’.

‘Due Process’ kills what makes us Homo Sapiens: Thinking.
 

Tags: bureaucracy, due process, cluelessness, no-fly, tsa