In the toils

It's a great idea: my solar panels pay for themselves in part by the auctioning of certificates denominated in kilowatts-hours to companies needing credits for non-fossil fuel. I win; they win; the environment wins. But just because it's good doesn't mean it's easy.

Like a character in a novel of bureaucratic futility, I find myself sent from entity to entity, registering, confirming, re-registering, and still not clearer about how exactly the system works, where I am in it and what I need to do next. I've been at this for weeks.

Everybody in all the offices and agencies has been pleasant, helpful, ready to call me back with the information I ask for, but who has the overview?  Instead I feel like I following one dark passage after another on and on.

The you I want is a guide.

I'm a guide once a week for some of my students, taking them on tours of different institutions or sections of the city. I make my excursions thematic, built around interesting, illustrative stories, yet I have to know where we're going and be able to clip parts of the route when people are tired or the weather's bad. I have to have a map ready in my mind with, at any moment, the nearby T stops, the connectors and the dead ends, the shortcuts. All this because I want you, my students, to understand enough to want to and be able to guide yourselves.

I can imagine such a guide saying to me: Have you registered there and there? Be sure to get this done by that deadline. These two agencies have this relationship. Baffled? Here let me help. This is very important; that not so. Can you see how each entity has its own slightly different mission and mandate, of which you are not the main focus? Do you see the constellation they form? Can you see the end ahead? We're almost there. Keep on.

Missing you, oh guide, I'll prod and pester until I get results, and my money. But like any teacher, I'd like to be able to show others the better way I've learned from my experience, and give them the big picture they'll need to go forward on their own. Let's beat down some paths so that anyone interested in doing this kind of good finds it easy.