More Adventures in Bureaucracy

For the third time in about two weeks and around the tenth time overall, I made the trek downtown to the Seattle Department of Planning, in the never-ending effort to secure final approval for our backyard studio/workshop/money pit.

I never quite know what to expect when I show up there other than feeling queasy rising up twenty floors in the elevator and the certainty of waiting around a bit (or more).

One day I’ll be welcomed as an old friend, a compatriot in the ongoing development of our fair city, a hard-working homeowner who deserves all the breaks he can get; the next time, I’m made to feel like a sleazy developer who’s trying to get away with cutting corners, gaming the system, and polluting our groundwater.

It all seems to come down to whom you talk to on a given day and what sort of day he or she is having. Today, the overall mood of the place struck me as pretty cheerful; one of the permit specialists was asking people how to spell “courteosity,” a word that apparently combines courtesy and curiosity, which I guess is a trait clients of the Planning Department should exhibit when they’re asking one more dumb question of the people who work there.

I was told when I signed in that the wait would be around an hour and a half, so I settled in with the new Dave Eggers novel, What is the What, which is chronicling the story of a lost boy from the Sudan helped to put my day’s tribulations into perspective.

But lo and behold, my name was called after barely twenty minutes and the planning specialist I spoke to—to whom I exhibited real “courteosity”—was very helpful, extremely efficient, and on my side all the way.

So our permit has been modified as requested by the inspector; all we need is final electrical approval and we’re golden.

That’s way better than I had planned for.