I Am Not an Archivist: Careless Automation and Disability

I'm writing this in a studio that has had no heating since early July.

I have reported it by email, by phone, through a formal complaint form, and to the building's reception. This week, a phone call finally explained why nothing happened: my emails and calls had been going to a team in another city the whole time.

Nobody noticed. Nobody told me. I only found out because I kept chasing.

This piece isn't really about one cold studio. It's about the job that lands on you when a system fails and nobody owns the failure.

This article is also published on dev.to.

The job nobody hired me for

When an organization's software gets something wrong, the work of putting it right rarely stays with the organization. It moves to the person.

You become the archivist, keeping every email, screenshot, reference number and date, because one day you may need to prove what happened.

You become the advocate, writing the complaint, finding the escalation route, and quoting the organization's own policies back to it.

You become the detective, connecting the dots its systems never connect: why this charge, why this name, why this rejection.

And you become the project manager, tracking deadlines across a dozen institutions that never talk to each other.

I have ADHD and autism, and I live with memory difficulties and other health conditions. I cannot do this job reliably on my own. Most people couldn't keep it up for long, and nobody should have to.

Four failures, one shape

The heating that was "logged on the system"

Before that phone call, the most anyone had told me was that my issue was "logged on the system." No reference number, no name, no timeline.

When I tried the out-of-hours number on the wall, it belonged to a separate estates company that looks after the building but not the flats, so they sent me back. The building's own receptionist told me she gets no replies from the company either. The direct number I was finally given shows as invalid on my phone.

Every route pointed somewhere else. The only person who ever owned the problem was me.

The person who doesn't exist

When I moved in, about three years ago, I had already changed my name by deed poll. The company managing the building at the time would not accept it and registered me under my old name.

I complained in writing and in person. Staff at their local office told me to ignore the messages or block them.

Then the building changed hands, and the new company inherited the old record. One day, two property inspectors walked into my studio while I was at my computer in my pajamas. Their records said nobody lived there.

Once, when I was locked out of my flat, the agent on the phone wouldn't help me, because someone else was registered at my address under a different name.

A deposit replacement scheme was about to take its once-a-year fee from me twice. After I canceled the Direct Debit, an automated email warned that I might have to pay twice, because more than one person was on my tenancy.

I live alone. The "other person" is a record nobody corrected.

The emails I had to silence

For about a year and a half, the new company's system sent me automated emails asking me to set up a Direct Debit, often several times a week. I asked many times for them to stop. There was no unsubscribe link.

In the end, I blocked the sender so my main inbox could stay usable for the things that matter. Later, I learned that the same system also sends maintenance updates. To protect myself from the noise, I may have lost the signal.

That trade should never be the user's to make.

The rejection that arrived in a minute

My passport is due for renewal, so I applied online through my home country's service. I was rejected five times. Each rejection arrived about a minute after I submitted, with identical wording and no reason.

Staff on the phone said my biometric data needed updating. I made the long, expensive journey to the consulate in London, and the officer at the counter said my biometric data was valid. Nobody could explain the rejections.

My best guess is that the first rejection left a flag on my record, and that flag rejects every new attempt automatically until a human clears it. But that is only a guess, because no one has looked.

The pattern

Put those four stories side by side, and the same shape appears:

A system holds a record or makes a decision.
The record is wrong, or the decision comes with no reason.
Nobody inside the organization owns the error.
The person is left to notice it, prove it and chase it, often while being treated as the problem.

None of these failures is complicated to fix. Route a report to the right team. Update a name when a deed poll arrives. Add an unsubscribe link. Attach a reason to a rejection.

Each fix is small. What makes the failures heavy is that they never end, and they never stay inside one institution.

There's a name for this

Researchers call it administrative burden. Donald Moynihan, Pamela Herd and Hope Harvey describe it as three kinds of cost that people carry when they deal with institutions:

Learning costs: working out what is required of you.
Compliance costs: the forms, documents, calls and waiting.
Psychological costs: the stress, frustration and stigma.

Their work makes two points that match my life closely. These costs fall unevenly, and they land hardest on people with the least time, money and capacity to absorb them. And how much burden a person carries is often a matter of choice, not accident, even when nobody sits down and decides it.

Disability multiplies all three costs. If your memory is unreliable, keeping records is harder. If phone calls are difficult, every escalation costs more. If you are already exhausted, each new failure arrives when you have the least to give.

It isn't just me

At national scale, the same shape has caused enormous harm.

In the UK, the Post Office prosecuted more than 700 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015, using figures from its Horizon accounting system that showed money missing. In 2019, the High Court found that Horizon contained bugs, errors and defects capable of causing those shortfalls. In 2024, new laws quashed the convictions. For years, people were told the computer was right and they were wrong.

In Australia, the Robodebt scheme ran from 2015 to 2019. It averaged people's annual income to calculate debts, and it raised about 1.73 billion Australian dollars in unlawful debts against more than 400,000 people. The job of proving whether a debt existed moved onto the people receiving the letters, often with income evidence from years before. The Royal Commission called it "a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal."

In the Netherlands, the tax authority wrongly accused tens of thousands of parents of childcare benefit fraud and demanded repayments that drove families into hardship. Dual nationality was used as one of its risk indicators. The government resigned over it in January 2021, and more than 33,000 people have since been officially recognized as victims.

Each case has the same core. The system's record is treated as the truth, and the person has to prove otherwise, with documents nobody told them to keep.

What it costs

The cost I feel most is not the hours. It's the vigilance.

I find myself trying to predict where the next failure will come from, so I can keep the right records before I need them. When a failure does arrive, I often don't have the capacity to act on it, or the document I need is long gone.

It is humiliating to explain the same thing again and again to people who have the records in front of them. It is heartbreaking to be treated as an inconvenience for asking for something basic, like heat in October.

And it accumulates. Housing, banking, benefits, government, healthcare: every system I am registered with is another place where a wrong record can sit for years, waiting for me to find it.

The only reason I can keep up at all is that I use AI tools to hold the threads for me: drafting the complaint, tracking the deadlines, remembering what I told whom. That is an accessibility tool, the same as glasses. But it shouldn't be the price of being treated fairly.