I’m less than 12 hours away from being 40 and I’m already embracing the old lady within. Shaking my fist at a cloud, my cane at the youth, my ass at my husband. Not too much of the latter, lest I hurt my already hurt back.

Today I woke up to a voicemail from one of my job prospects that the typing test I need to complete in order to be granted an interview–a typing test I last took less than a year ago but expired in 6 months, because I suppose it’s possible in that time I would suddenly forget how to get my thoughts out at 85 net wpm–has likely been sent by email to my work email, not my personal one, because it was my work email that I applied to the job with, using the internal work careers site.

The same work email I have zero access to unless I am physically at work, and the last day I worked was Monday, and I have no more shifts now.

The typing test link has to be clicked within 48 hours, and if it is not, they will need to resend it.

I did make sure, when I applied, that my personal email was also in my profile, also connected to my account, but apparently that is not good enough. The third party company that does the typing test can’t figure that out, I suppose, or the machines don’t speak nicely enough to each other to make it happen. I don’t know what happens on the backend, I only know that the only way I’m going to be able to check my work email is if I drive to work tomorrow and ask if I can log onto a computer to check it.

I don’t want to do that. It’s my 40th birthday tomorrow and I don’t want to drive a hour away to check my email for an email that might not be there.

I don’t want to do it on the weekend, either; I already have plans for the whole thing and I don’t want to disrupt them for this or anything else. The next time I might be at my old work place would be next week, if I try to pick up that shift and if I get it, which I might, but I haven’t decided yet.

It’s this sort of bureaucratic hoop-jumping that makes me feel less like a human being and more like a trained seal, and makes me and likely other Millennials my age feel like walking into the forest rather than having to deal with another minute of “modern life, modern convenience”.

It’s so convenient, don’t you know, that we can send the link to the typing test directly to your computer and you can do it at home! So convenient that the link to the test expires in 48 hours. So convenient that we’ll send it to the wrong email and not be able to send it to the right one, for reasons beyond comprehension.

Perhaps it’s old of me to question this, but I don’t understand why I need to do a typing test at all. I tested out of school at 85 net words per minute, and then I did a typing test to work for the hospital in 2020. I then tested again in August, 2025, to work at my current position (a temporary relief line that has now ended), and I’ve been there for 11 months. Working. In a position that requires very fast typing.

In 11 months it is highly unlikely that my high typing speeds will suddenly degrade past the minimum that’s needed, yet my test results “expired” after 6 months.

(Of course the answer to why I need to retest so often is obvious, and it’s that the third party company that administers the tests gets paid by the employer for each one. Of course. I realize that. I’m still going to rail at how illogical it is.)

But okay, I need to do a typing test, along with a bunch of onboarding, which will also be done on my computer at home. Instead of having me just come into the office one day to do the test there–something that would make far more sense anyway, as it’s those computers I’d be working on, not my home ones, where my speeds might differ because the set up is more or less ergonomic.

In fact I’m sure they do, because I think last year’s typing test had me at 79 wpm, and that was one done at home–where my set up is not the best, my keyboards are old and grumpy and don’t always listen to my input correctly.

But no, that’s not more convenient. I mean, it would be for me, but my convenience is not the issue here, it seems.

I just get tired of all these systems we’ve set up, ostensibly to make things better, but instead I feel like Asterix and Obelix in the Place That Sends You Mad.

I remember watching this movie when I was a kid and loving every minute of it. Including the Place That Sends You Mad. I understood bureaucracy and its failings even then, at least from a distance–I saw my parents deal with that stuff all the time, and it was in place, to a lesser degree, in my school life.

What I didn’t understand was the visceral, bone-deep hatred I would feel once I experienced it as an adult, nor that things would only get worse as I aged. We’ve added layers of layers of layers of bureaucracy in every single aspect of our lives.

And no matter how frustrating it is, no matter how much we’d like to step outside of it all, it’s incredibly hard to do so. We are all trapped by some level of bureaucracy, whether it’s with finding a new job within a system that’s built up into a system of insanity, or getting permission from the state to do something with a property one owns, or trying to deal with literally any level of government for anything.

Hell, even university and college is like this–from the labyrinthine websites that are surely harbouring minotaurs somewhere within to the incessant hoops you must jump through just to get a degree. I suppose they’re not wrong when they say going to university “prepares you for the real world.”

Sure, because the real world is nothing but infuriating bureaucracy designed to drive you mad.

Anyway, if you need me I’ll be in a corner, gibbering.

EDIT: in the time it took me to write and publish this piece, the test arrived in my personal email inbox. Hallelujah, it is a miracle–perhaps brought on by my complaining to the cosmos. Squeaky wheels, etc. Anyway, now I know what I’m doing with my birthday.