Some of our readers will be able to recall the tedium of queueing at the Passport Office and realising they were not going to get to an official before the shutters came down for the day.
The feeling of powerlessness and anger which this experience produced was quite extraordinary.
Yet it must only be a fraction of what is felt by bewildered and angry asylum-seekers who find a door shut in their faces. For those who have no homes to go to, the stakes are higher.
Why would community welfare officers do a thing such as this?
Their motivation appears to stem from their knowledge that the system, or that corner of the system which they inhabit, is in a state of collapse and that the only way to get something done about it is to shut down the service.
On the face of it, this state of collapse has two causes. The first appears to be the increase in the number of asylum-seekers coming here.
This has risen from 200-300 a month in the early part of the year to about 1,000 a month since the summer.
In other words, the demand on the system run by these officials has more than trebled.
The second cause appears to be the difficulty in finding accommodation in the city for the asylum-seekers.
Officials can spend hours on the phone to landlords looking for a place for a family which has been queueing for hours. They try to give priority to families, so single people are, in effect, pushed further down the queue for very scarce accommodation.
It is understood that sometimes, in desperation, they have given individuals the price of a room for the night and told them to try to find somewhere to stay for themselves.
Some of these individuals end up sleeping on the streets. Some have called to Garda stations looking for accommodation through the Eastern Health Board's "out of hours" service, which deals exclusively with children and which often cannot find a bed for the night even for these.
There are other causes, however, and these have to do with attitudes and policies.
First, officialdom appears still to look on the arrival of asylum-seekers as something that came out of nowhere and will go away. The evidence for this is that the number of arrivals has been increasing steadily since April and has been around the 1,000 mark since August.
Yet, in November, we have still not put in place sufficient welfare officers to deal with queues which start in the middle of the night and which must be exhausting and soul-destroying for those queueing. We need to change that attitude: we are a country to which asylum-seekers will continue to come and, if we are to avoid the scenes we saw yesterday, we must build our services around that assumption.
It is not only in relation to asylum-seekers that we act as if problems are going to go away. The same is true of homeless people who often cannot find a place in a hostel and who end up sleeping rough. The supply of hostel places was allowed to become inadequate; but homeless people have not gone away and some end up in city doorways.
In Dublin, attempts have been made by the Eastern Health Board and Dublin Corporation, in conjunction with bodies such as Crosscare and the Salvation Army, to make extra emergency places available for homeless people, but these services find themselves having to turn people away as soon as they open. What is being done is not enough.
And here, perhaps, is the third cause of what we have been seeing this week. Both of these groups are marginalised. Politicians don't flock around them. Local authorities provide services in conjunction with religious groups, and one wonders whether these services would have been provided in the first place were these groups not there to help.
But there is no mobilisation of the resources of this affluent State to directly provide shelter, accommodation, a place to lie down.
Instead, it is left to officials to take what to those in the queues must seem like harsh and cruel action to highlight a problem which the administrative and political systems have known about all along and have done precious little to address.