Every one of us has tried to have an argument with an employee of a big company, and it always goes like this:

the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to.

So should we give people more discretion in which processes they follow?

In some cases, yes! The article contains some compelling examples of when "breaking the rules" is the preferable outcome.

But there are some unacknowledged downsides to letting people decide which rules are applicable - and that's people's personal prejudices.

The article say some of the discontent with the modern world can be blamed on over-adherence to rules. For example:

The skepticism toward judges? It fits. They often seem more devoted to procedure than to justice.

Imagine a world without sentencing guidelines. Perhaps the judge is from a different tribe to the accused and punishes them much more harshly than a clan-member. Would that seem fair?

The customer service agent just doesn't like people of your gender, and refuses to process your refund.

You give the bank manager a firm handshake and he approves your loan - even though you don't technically qualify you look like a decent sort of chap.

And on it goes.

Look, there's no doubt plenty of bias encoded within processes. All processes should be regularly reviewed and updated. Breaking a process in extremis can be a good idea. When confronted with an inflexible policy, you may feel like a mere cog in a machine - but at least the machine is prevented from discriminating against your type of cogs.

A well-defined process dehumanises both sides.

Recently, I tried to register with phone company EE. When someone asks for my first name, I usually just give my initial. But this box wasn't having any of my nonsense. It demanded two characters - and no "unusual" characters.

What are unusual characters?

About 16% of the world use "Chinese" characters (it's more complicated than that).

In the UK, where I am, it is pretty normal to find people with fancy European diacritics.

It's the banality of the bigotry which gets to me. Usual. Normal. Standard. They're just dull ways for dull people with limited imaginations to dehumanise other people. The people who designed this form probably didn't think of themselves as racist. They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary.

Language matters. We're a decade on from "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" - so ignorance is no excuse. And telling people that their names are abnormal is rude.

The form itself doesn't actually do a good job of validating names. It quite happily allowed me to register with my name consisting of two apostrophes.

Basically, if your form can't register Beyoncé - it has failed.