Suffering through bureaucracy is universal, yes.
Being rendered routinely nonfunctional by bureaucracy specifically because one to a completely unquestioning degree believes that rules are accurately stated and does not understand they’re intended to have unspoken wiggle room and exceptions and be interpreted by the people administrating them is a much more narrow and non-universal issue.
The phone call being recommended here is not to get a quick summary of the rules so I don’t have to read them - I’ve read them all! I’ve spent dozens of hours on it, per task! (And would rather do that than call someone on a phone.)
The problem isn’t that I need to call in order to get information on what the rules are, and that’s not why I’m being advised to call. I’m being told to call in order to bypass and dismiss the rules. In order to have a sympathetic person say “oh yeah we don’t really need that, they never actually check” despite the fact that the rules which I have studied exhaustively say that they do. To have someone say “eh, I can email my boss and she’ll probably let you get away with substituting X for the Y you’re supposed to have”. To say “oh we write down that that’s required but it’s more that it’s faster to process stuff if you have it”.
The problem isn’t that I feel less capable because I don’t know things to a T. The problem is that I DO know things to a T. (Often better than the bureaucrats I end up talking to - I’ve learned to have the relevant regulations etc pulled up on my phone or printed out if I know I actually am on the right side of the rules so I can point to the fact that yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, they are the ones doing it incorrectly.)
The problem isn’t that I need somebody to tell me the rules - that would be a perfectly ordinary non-autistic issue. The problem is that I believe and trust and accept as immutable the rules that I know (to a T), which is an autistic issue.
[There are also axes of privilege involved here - rules are much more likely to be real (ie not dismissed by sympathetic bureaucrats/authorities) for a marginalized person, particularly to one who’s marginalized in a way that results in not being great with the expected social niceties, than to a wealthy majority-race abled cishet etc person. My grandmother’s a lot more likely to be told “don’t worry about it, we’ll let it slide this once”, if she makes that phone call, than I am. But that’s a second issue that intersectionally overlaps, not an issue that invalidates the one I’m discussing.]
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