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A Denial in 40 Minutes—and the Fight for Paper · Ryan's Journal

• 0:15
  Forty minutes.
• 0:16
  That's the whole timeline.
• 0:18
  At 6:51 on Thursday evening, Ryan sends the formal email with the seven day deadline
• 0:23
  and the nine verb reservation clause.
• 0:26
  At 7:31 Mountain Time he's recording himself, and the housing authority has already
• 0:32
  written back with a flat no.
• 0:34
  Forty minutes.
• 0:35
  I've seen tag teams take longer to decide who gets the hot tag.
• 0:39
  Fast.
• 0:40
  They were fast.
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  Ten months of nothing, and then forty minutes and boom, a denial.
• 0:46
  Very efficient.
• 0:47
  When they want to say no, they are the best in the business,
• 0:51
  nobody says no faster.
• 0:53
  But Ryan caught it.
• 0:54
  He caught the whole thing.
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  And I love what he says, he says it twice, three times: there's where I caught
• 1:01
  myself.
• 1:02
  I caught myself.
• 1:03
  Let me sell you on what just happened here, because it's a great product.
• 1:07
  You've got a guy on eighteen months of sleep deprivation.
• 1:10
  Eighteen months!
• 1:12
  Most of us can't find our keys after one bad night.
• 1:15
  And he's sitting there at seven thirty one at night, reads a denial email,
• 1:19
  and spots the exact thing the agency left out.
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  No mention of the interactive process anywhere.
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  Not a sentence, not a hint.
• 1:29
  One denial, and the conversation they're supposed to be having never even got
• 1:33
  started.
• 1:34
  What gets me is how human it is, though.
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  He's tired, and he's honest about it.
• 1:38
  He keeps starting over, he says I'll double check, I think it was a denial,
• 1:43
  I'm pretty sure.
• 1:44
  He's not pretending to be a lawyer, he's just a person at the end of a long day who
• 1:48
  notices something doesn't add up.
• 1:50
  And then Ellie, his caretaker, tells him he's not asking for the moon.
• 1:55
  Honestly, that line is going to stay with me.
• 1:57
  Not the moon.
• 1:58
  Just a stamp.
• 1:59
  Right, and credit to Ellie.
• 2:01
  He mentioned her as Ellie and then Nelly at one point, but the line is the same
• 2:05
  either way.
• 2:07
  I'm not asking for the moon, I'm asking for a reasonable accommodation.
• 2:11
  And his advocate Susan, he told her he's planning to file a lawsuit and that the
• 2:16
  housing authority, his words, crapped on us after ten months.
• 2:21
  She didn't call it unreasonable.
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  Neither did Ellie.
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  That's his corner, and in this business the corner matters.
• 2:27
  So here's the plan, and it's a good plan.
• 2:29
  He goes back to the first email, the original request, and he replies to it.
• 2:35
  He says, okay, that's a denial as I understand it, so now the interactive process
• 2:41
  starts.
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  Now.
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  Not later.
• 2:43
  Now.
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  He doesn't argue the denial, he makes them do the thing they skipped.
• 2:49
  That is a strong move.
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  Very strong.
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  Everybody should be doing it.
• 2:53
  And let's be clear on what the government itself says, because I always want the
• 2:57
  receipts.
• 2:58
  The joint HUD and Justice Department guidance on reasonable accommodations says that
• 3:03
  when a provider refuses a request as unreasonable, the provider should discuss
• 3:09
  whether there's an alternative that meets the person's disability related needs.
• 3:14
  It also calls the interactive process helpful to all concerned.
• 3:19
  Helpful!
• 3:20
  That's the word they use.
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  I'll note the document says should and helpful, not that the sky falls.
• 3:27
  Whether skipping it breaks the law is for a court or a fair housing agency to
• 3:32
  decide.
• 3:33
  But as a sales pitch?
• 3:34
  Ryan's holding the better brochure.
• 3:37
  And what I like is that he's not just saying no to everything.
• 3:41
  He's offering ways to get there.
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  First, he wants reconsideration, with the medical support from his doctor,
• 3:47
  Dr.
• 3:48
  Koontz, connecting his anxiety about whether a document is real to why he needs it
• 3:54
  authenticated.
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  The guidance talks about that connection, the nexus, between the disability and the
• 3:59
  request.
• 4:00
  He's already thinking about it.
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  Then he builds the fallback ladder, rung by rung.
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  Rung one, a sticker or a symbol of his choosing on the policy documents so he can
• 4:10
  tell they're the real thing.
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  Rung two, certified mail through the Postal Service with a signature,
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  a traceable paper chain.
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  And rung three, the part that made me stop, if they say postage is too expensive,
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  he offers to split it.
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  Half and half.
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  Fifty fifty.
• 4:25
  The tenant is offering to help pay for the agency to do right by him.
• 4:29
  Unbelievable.
• 4:30
  Fifty fifty!
• 4:31
  You never see that.
• 4:32
  Nobody offers that.
• 4:34
  Tenants don't do that, but Ryan does that.
• 4:37
  And listen, I'd note the guidance says a person isn't obligated to accept an
• 4:42
  alternative if it won't meet their needs and their preferred accommodation is
• 4:47
  reasonable.
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  So he's being generous, but he doesn't have to be.
• 4:51
  That's leverage.
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  That's momentum.
• 4:54
  He's the one who looks reasonable, and they're the ones who look like a closed door.
• 4:59
  One more number, since he's got a clock running.
• 5:02
  He told us there's a notice from his mailbox claiming he owes about a hundred and
• 5:06
  thirty dollars.
• 5:08
  He says he thinks he does owe something, so he's not dodging it.
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  Now he's got a financial dispute stacked on top of a paperwork fight.
• 5:16
  A hundred and thirty bucks, ten months of silence, and a stamp.
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  That's the whole Greek tragedy.
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  And the thing is, for a lot of us the paper is the scary part,
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  not the money.
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  When you're exhausted and anxious, a letter you can't verify isn't just a letter.
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  It's a worry that doesn't go away.
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  I think that's the part the staff keep missing.
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  It isn't a fight about a stamp.
• 5:39
  It's about being able to trust what's in your own mailbox.
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  Then he zooms out, and this is where it gets big.
• 5:46
  He says he's trying to save paper notarization.
• 5:49
  His argument is that digital opens the door to cyber hacks,
• 5:53
  malware, viruses, phishing.
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  And he says his information has supposedly been exposed on the dark web,
• 6:00
  according to the credit bureau he uses as a reference.
• 6:03
  So in his mind this isn't only his lease, it's the whole sport of notarization on
• 6:08
  the line.
• 6:09
  Let's check the scoreboard, because the numbers are interesting.
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  According to the research we've got, 47 states have passed permanent Remote Online
• 6:17
  Notarization laws.
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  Three haven't.
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  Georgia and South Carolina allow in person electronic notarization,
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  where the signing is digital but the notary and signer still share a room.
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  Alabama uses remote ink notarization, where you meet over video but the paper still
• 6:36
  gets signed by hand in wet ink and mailed to the notary.
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  Mississippi, a side note, has operated under temporary executive orders instead of a
• 6:47
  standard permanent statute.
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  So the paper team, they're down.
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  Forty seven to three.
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  But here's the thing, and it's a beautiful thing, paper notarization is still fully
• 6:59
  valid in all fifty states.
• 7:02
  All fifty!
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  Deeds, trusts, court filings, they still love paper.
• 7:08
  Paper is not dead.
• 7:09
  Paper is not going anywhere.
• 7:12
  Ryan is not defending something extinct, he's defending something that still wins.
• 7:17
  And to be fair to him, the argument for paper is real.
• 7:20
  A person looks at your actual ID in their hands, watches how you're doing in the
• 7:25
  moment, presses a seal onto a page, and no server outage can erase that.
• 7:32
  But the other side has a case too.
• 7:34
  Digital notarization brings tamper evident signatures, identity checks,
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  those knowledge questions, and a required recording of the whole signing session,
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  kept for ten years.
• 7:45
  Honestly, I'd want to hear both sides before I took a team.
• 7:49
  Here's my one caution, and I say it with love.
• 7:51
  Those notarization laws are about how notaries do their jobs.
• 7:56
  Ryan's request is about a housing authority's policy communications and an
• 8:00
  accommodation tied to his doctor's recommendation.
• 8:03
  So the paper versus cyberspace debate is his big picture, but his strongest ground
• 8:09
  is the narrow one: the request, the nexus, and the missing conversation.
• 8:14
  That's the smart read.
• 8:15
  And he knows the clock too, he said himself that about two weeks is the maximum to
• 8:19
  approve or deny a request.
• 8:21
  He sounds sure of his footing.
• 8:23
  Ten months in, with a denial that never even opened the conversation,
• 8:27
  he says he's going to keep pushing for the notarization.
• 8:29
  And I'll tell you, after eighteen months without real sleep,
• 8:33
  he still ended that recording almost laughing.
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  It's a miracle, he says, I almost went up in a flame, but I'm trying to save paper.
• 8:41
  He's trying to save paper.
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  And you know what?
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  He just might.
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  Reconsideration, rebuttal, certified mail, fifty fifty on the postage.
• 8:50
  Step by step.
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  He's not done.
• 8:52
  Not even close.