Opinion/Editorial
THE TRASH WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO
Voicemail is destroying the qualitative nature of corporate and even personal service for the supposed gain of efficiency and time-saving labor. The efficiency gained, however, is fast coming at the expense of consumer goodwill. Who wants to call AT&T today? How about any of the utility companies that used to serve us, but now simply supply power or water and then sit back to not give much of a damn. How many of us have waited on hold for so many minutes that we hang up…not able to any longer to listen to just awful music on hold? How many have used ‘call back’ features only to discover that the outfit called calls back six or seven hours later? And why don’t these companies use their names so caller I.D. will reveal them instead of some 800 or 866 number most of us won’t respond to at all? When we get through we invariably get some call center where the person, Frank or Susan or some such, barely speaks English. What is that? How is an instant apology for everything going to fix any problem that might have generated the call? The robots have turned out to be the best.
I somehow came to owe $666 on my electric bill. I was shocked to the core to receive a coming shut-off date. I called. The first woman wanted all the money or shutoff would occur. I hung up and called again. The second woman wanted three hundred down and a one-year payment plan for the rest. I hung up again, to consider what had happened in the space of only a few minutes. I then called the automatic payment number to use my credit card to take care of the 300 and get the payment plan. A robot came on the line. The female voice informed me that I owed 666 dollars. I waited during a several-second delay. Then the robot said that I could take advantage of a payment plan brought about by the virus if I punched the number one button indicating that I’d been affected. I punched it. The robot offered to give me an 18-month payment plan and pay 75.00 down. I paid. The robot said thank you, gave me a confirmation number (which I taped to my computer screen!), and the payments that would be due starting in three months! I love my robot at the electric company. I would call her again, just to talk, but I probably would never find her if I called.
Writing about having to listen to awful recordings, how is it possible what politics has turned into, as a broadcast organ? How is it possible that now that Trump has been defeated and sent to Florida, where he so most properly fits in and belongs, that the media will not let his brand of totalitarian lying crap die with his departure? They lost too much. The mass media converted over to the National News Media…and that conversion took along with it most parts of decent quality programming. ‘Reality T.V.’ had already caught on, as producers found that American audiences were indeed dumb enough to be titillated by really badly scripted reality television shows. The worse the show the higher the ratings. Then came the Trump. News is the cheapest way to project out into a larger audience. At least it was until the public became so doubting of any truth in it that they began to move away…and hence the ‘news’ shows had to become ever more specious, lying, and outrageous.
The news stopped being generated by reporters in the field and became a creation of what it was informed to report by those in power. Now, the media companies kind of wander, still in shock. Biden is a no-news president. He does not emit the kind of emotive lying crap that Trump did every day (along with Palin, Bachmann, Coulter, and now Green and more). So, the money has dried up, as these production companies try to figure out what to do. Back to Trump. He worked the last time, why not another run at it? The public’s ability to discern has always been pretty low, but never lower than right now.
That vaccination can be portrayed as damaging or bad is almost beyond belief, but there it is. The networks play stuff about getting vaccinated while they show continuous reels of people getting needles plunged into their arms. Do the math about the real message. How can people not see the intrinsic good that has taken place because of a of the stimulus bills? Nope, the portrayal of people being too well off to work, and therefore not enough jobs are being regained, is all over the place. Just stupid. But right there in front of us all…being portrayed, by the way, mostly by people who do not and never have had real jobs.
