Consider the following comments on bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is the art of turning a person into a case.
The form was designed for everyone, which is why it fits no one in particular.
Every rule that protects us from the worst official also frustrates the best one.
We curse the queue until we remember the chaos it replaced.
A system that asks no questions about you is also one that will never see you.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that the experience of dealing with a large impersonal system, a hospital, an immigration office, a university, teaches something uncomfortable about how easily a whole person becomes a number, and yet how the alternative might be worse. Open with a remembered encounter with the machinery, the hours on hold, the form that had no box for your actual situation, the clerk bound by a rule that made no sense for you. Then work the tension: the rules that reduce us to cases are the same rules that stop our fate from depending on one official's mood, so the impersonality that frustrates is also a kind of fairness. A useful structural move contrasts how it feels to be processed by a system against how it would feel to be entirely at the mercy of someone's whim. Caution: resist the easy rant that bureaucracy is simply soulless, since the longing for it to just see me is also a longing for someone to be allowed to bend the rules, which is exactly how favouritism begins.