“YOUR son’s name is not here,” the employee at the school registration office said.

“This is my son,” I told her as I pointed to the name “Federico Munar” written on the certificate of residency issued by the Tamuning Mayor’s Office.

“Your son’s name is Danilo Federico Munar; the name on this paper can be any Federico Munar,” she said.

“What are the odds that this Federico Munar, who you said can be ‘any Federico Munar,’ can have the same date of birth, the same SS number, a mother with the same name and living at the same address?” I asked her, rhetorically.

“I’m sorry this is no good. I can’t accept this paper,” she said. “You have to go back to the mayor’s office. It’s the protocol.”

I thought of challenging her verdict but realized soon enough that any attempt to appeal to logic when dealing with a bureaucrat is an exercise in futility. Plus, if you are desperate you have no other choice but to play along in this theater of the absurd. You have to follow the, uh, protocol.

I should know. It has been seven months since I started this seemingly endless effort to get my 19-year-old autistic son into the Department of Education’s special education program. These seven months of going back and forth have been amusing and insane. Each step of the multilevel process would start with optimism and end in frustration. It’s like navigating a labyrinth with no exit. Each passage hits a dead end.

Before I began this process, I was warned by a couple of parents of special needs children about the laborious tasks – paper work requirements and all – that they said I would have to go through. “Be prepared,” they told me. (At least two of them have since left Guam and relocated to the states due to frustrations.)

But I guess they didn’t warn me enough.

“I’m sorry you have to go through all these; we need to protect ourselves,” one of the school administrators explained, as she read to me the rules and regulations that she said the school had to follow. “It’s the law,” she declared with utmost conviction.

Sometimes, rules and regulations develop a life on their own, transforming into a dystopian monster – a Frankenstein beyond control – that governs the system into mindlessness. You wonder whether or not to forgive the bureaucrats who are trapped in the system that inextricably curses them with cretinism.

Such curse is, of course, not exclusive to Guam. Bureaucracy is a universal affliction, well satirized in Kafka’s “The Trial” and “The Castle,” and Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

People seem to avoid thinking when they are at the mercy of legal codes. Every action is defined by section number, title number, and chapter number of a public law. These codes have become the refuge of the lazy mind. They replace creativity. They render the sanctity of life meaningless.

But blaming the faceless culprits is a demonstration of a defeatist attitude. People in government who succumb to dehumanizing stagnation are not beyond reproach. If plainly following the rules, instead of achieving the actual goal for which the rules are made, is considered the gauge of success and a mark of pride, then we are stuck in the pit of absurdity.

Now back to my son: The school has finally allowed him to be registered into the program. But being a veteran of bureaucratic runaround, I knew so well not to get excited too soon. The process is not completely done. I was told I still have fill out two forms and wait for the next procedure.

I know, paperwork and procedures are more important than my son’s welfare and education.