Automation=Evil=Must Die.

So after spending an estimated 5,730 hours navigating automated phone menus in an effort to get the trivial pieces of information I’ve needed in various situations throughout my life, I’ve come to the conclusion that automated phone menus are going to be the downfall of our civilization.

It all started with a creative type, probably a liberal arts major-turned consultant who dreamt up the idea of the automated phone menu, allowing business, government offices, and customer service departments worldwide to eliminate call centers in lieu of some low monthly fee to be paid directly to him. 
“Eureka!” he shrieked, knocking over his chair as he leapt to his feet, unsettling the cup of chai tea next to his legal pads of poetry and Great Business Ideas.  “This automated menu could do wonders for businesses, government offices, and customer service departments worldwide, enabling them to reassign high-paid employees taking calls, thereby freeing up all sorts of assets to boost the economy and hyperinflate my bank balances!”

Well, I’m sure that guy did all right for himself, but it’s been one sad story of waste and disappointment for the rest of us ever since.  Just try to estimate how many hours you’ve spent hitting “4” to manage your account, only to be dumped into a dead-end menu that has nothing to offer you in your moment of need and giving you no options to extricate yourself.  * doesn’t work.  # doesn’t work.  *67 doesn’t work.  Repeating obscene phrases at high decibel levels into the earpiece doesn’t work.  All that’s left to you is to end the call and start again, or curse God and die.

I would imagine the ratio of total dollars saved by those who make use of automated menus to total dollars of employee productivity lost while navigating those labyrinthine systems and venting to their coworkers is on the order to 1 to 20.  That’s not even close to what it would be if we factored in property destruction.

Maybe if that lady at the KC, MO Police Tow Lot hadn’t let her phone sit on hold for 25 minutes while toasting marshmallows over a fire fueled by the reams of meaningless paperwork offered in sacrifical homage to the pitiless and cruel Solemn Arbiter of Motor Vehicles by countless millions, I would be a free man today.

Happy Birthday to Me

"Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for ever species of sh*t that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great sh*thouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday." 

Walker Percy

The Moviegoer

Ever since I read this several years ago, it seemed like it was destined to commemorate in some form my own thirtieth birthday.  It doesn't necessarily represent my own subjective state of mind, but I present it nonetheless.  Thanks for the birthday wishes from those who sent them along.

totus  +  amdg  +  tuus

 

A Question I Want Answered

So, Lord, that time I was living in El Salvador for the summer as a seminarian? Yeah, nice work getting me there, that was a TRIP. So, two things: when I left that coral snake in a soda bottle for 5 hours in my room without the cap on, can you set me up with some instant replay of 1) how he got out of the bottle without tipping it over, and 2) where in Creation did he GO? Because so far as I can tell, that thing straight up DISAPPEARED. So, thanks for protecting me from the wiles of the serpent and the shadow of death and all, but to tell you the truth (what else would You want?) I'd almost rather have been bitten just to have the security of knowing WHAT IN YOUR NAME HAPPENED. Weeks on end of shaking my clothes out and keeping an eye on the drain while I shower just isn't worth it.