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The little Hitlers at the Maryland Bureau of Vital Statistics literally stole my daughter's last name from her. When she was born, we didn't have her first names selected yet, so we had to later file a paper whose clearly-defined only purpose was to add given names. We carefully and properly followed the instructions, to the letter.
Instead of doing what she should have done, the administrative dweeb we had the bad luck to draw stripped off our daughter's family name completely and assigned a middle name as her last name.
When we pointed out the error, they said, in essence, "I'm sorry, that's the way it is. You didn't fill out the form properly. You should have written in the last name in as well [even though the blank was very clearly ONLY for GIVEN names, and even though the form gave NO authority whatsoever for anybody to change or remove a family name]. If you want this changed, you'll have to go to court and get a court order to do it."
Part of it was sheer cussedness, but my wife and I are convinced to this day that part of it was just racism (we're white, and the functionary who screwed up the birth certificate was black). It was like, "Take that, Whitey."
And it's not like we weren't nice in dealing with the stupid jerk of a woman. We never acted impolitely in any way; we simply politely requested that the mistake that the state employee had made be put right.
In the end, we had to appeal the thing all the way up to the #&*@(#*! State Registrar -- the top executive in charge of the State Bureau of Vital Statistics -- in order to get our daughter's last name back!!
Story #2:
Last week, I went to the local Social Security office to get a social security card for the same daughter. While I was waiting, a boy around 12 (nice-enough kid) came into the front door. The armed security dweeb (this particular functionary was a stupid-looking white guy aged about 35, just to show you I'm not picking on black functionaries in particular) kind of threw his weight around and acted like a big-shot "security man" in front of the boy, whose mother was parking the car. "She'd better hurry," said the armed security officer. "It's almost 4 o'clock, and I'm lockin' that door at 4 o'clock."
"She's just parking the car," the boy said, intimidated and just a bit pleadingly. "She'll be here in just a minute."
"She's got 30 seconds," said Mr. Armed Security Man. (I actually thought he was just kidding the boy a little bit).
He then walked to the front door, arriving there at the same moment the boy's mother did. He blocked the door, refused her admittance, and turned out her son -- all because she arrived one or two seconds "too late."
As he walked back to his station, he shook his head and said out loud, with an obvious self-satisfied smirk, "Rules is rules."