College hopeful targets Oxford…What could possibly go wrong?

A quick anecdote: Over the course of late summer and into this fall, I worked very hard to complete an application to Oxford University, in England.

Realistically, I had almost no expectations regarding admission into such a prestigious school. I just planned to send in the application so that in later years, I could say I did.

After hours toiling away at essays and tests and readings and web-pages, however, I grew strangely attached to the project. I felt as though the application was going to be a landmark accomplishment for me—something of which I could be proud.

I dreamed about the day in late March when I tore open an envelope containing their decision and posted it (no matter the outcome) on the refrigerator for all to see. A real, tangible relic for all my hard work.

The editing of the main essay took slightly longer than expected and I found a pre-scheduled weekend out of town interfering with my time line.

Still, I had provided a two-day buffer for just this reason—I was NOT going to miss the deadline for submission.

The night before this deadline I finalized all components of the application, attached my well edited essay, and proceeded to select the “Pay and Send” option.

A declaration of my superiority over the British application system to my mother was followed by a quick entry of credit card details.

Expecting an “Application Complete” greeting on the next page, imagine my surprise when the payment did not go through because of a nonsense error.

Calming my spike in blood pressure, I tried again.

Same error.As my heart began to pound, I tried a different credit card. Nope. And the other credit card, double and triple checking everything. “Payment unsuccessful.”

Then the dagger: after the next attempt, I was greeted with a dead end screen that read, “You have exceeded the maximum attempt for a credit card. Please contact our Customer Service Department.”

Unfortunately, time differences between Old Forge and the United Kingdom made it impossible to follow this request.

My application had taken its last breath, and with it my dreams of a letter from England.

I hope you can sense the pain involved with this realization.

It reminded me, however, of our own lovely system of government and bureaucracy.

Every year, thousands upon thousands of hours of work get cut from local, state, and national budgets in the blink of an eye.

People in all three branches of government work earnestly for most of the year, preparing paperwork for allocation of tax dollars and other budgetary items, only to see the fruits of their labor get slashed because they are fairly voted as “unnecessary.”

Some citizens point to this as proof of a bureaucracy and a government that is just too big—all this work is just wasted every year.

But we need that paperwork, every year. That paperwork is part of the system that tries (whether you think they do it or not, they try) to correctly decide the proper places to spend government money each year.

We do not, however, need unnecessary amounts of labor going into this paperwork. And, surprisingly to most, there is relatively little waste in the bureaucracy.

The size of the federal government bureaucracy has actually decreased, per citizen, over the history of our country.

And with many more agencies and organizations having a say in Washington, and producing more paperwork, one can conclude that we have actually learned to maximize efficiency in the public sector.

Hopefully we can continue this trend and look to clean up government in other areas. This is a bipartisan issue—nobody wants unnecessary taxes, on any level.

Government is often spat upon as a lost cause. But if we examine our governments’ systems with fairness year to year, we will help ourselves and our fellow citizens.

And we will have a tangible reward for our hard work.

—

You can follow Colin Criss on Twitter @ADKCurrent