March, 2005

We’ve left the agrarian economy back with the horseshoes and people who actually milked cows with their hands into buckets; passed the industrial economy into the pathos of closed plants and moved into the service economy. Like all watersheds, we still produce the world’s biggest agricultural product in terms of bushels of this and that and still kick out a blue-gazillion small greasy parts that assemble into large greasy machines. But, by all generally accepted logic, this is the age of service.

Maybe I missed it. Perhaps it passed me by while I was trying to contact my bank.

My bank delights in telling me how important my call is to their entire organization and that I will be helped by absolutely the next available operator. This, after finally getting to an actual human being by listening to options, and numbers to punch to access those options, or at least the hold recording that belongs to those options. Slightly unsure if there might be a more appropriate option yet to come, I have of course run through the entire list and am now on the rerun. All of this from Europe to Atlanta at six bucks a minute.

To anyone other than a sixth-grade dropout, it’s painfully obvious that my bank has downsized its staff to the skinniest possibility. By the time I finally hear from absolutely the next available operator I’m not in absolutely the best available mood. I have no idea how the under-staffed deal with being both under-loved and under-paid on a day-in, day-out basis and still have anything at all left over for their families when they get home. They are the breaking wave of a new frontier (to mix a few metaphors) these toilers in the infertile fields of the services industries. These are the folks who made the move, took the advice and positioned themselves on the cutting edge. Sounds a bit like sitting on a razor.

The most obvious thing about the service economy into which we are committed is that it is a misnomer. Airlines are part of what is more and more broadly called services and they’ve been degrading almost as fast as filing for bankruptcy. Anyone checking in at an airport to find four reservation agents for first and business class, while two handle the cattle herded behind the curtain, comes to know that service simply doesn’t exist in that two-thirds of the aircraft. Planes are routinely overbooked, agents overworked and baggage overlooked.

Not all that long ago, one pulled into a gas station to find an honest-to-god attendant on duty, uniformed and (usually) smiling. As often as not he owned the joint. He filled the tank with an appropriate amount of gas, checked the oil and washer solvent, had a cursory look at various belts, washed the windows on all four sides and asked if you needed the tires checked. He made a good living at it, but that was when you actually got good service instead of just an economy named for it.

Few people service anything these days. Appliances and automobiles are no longer serviceable in the sense that you actually have them repaired. They are replaced in part or in total, but rarely serviced.

I’m not all that sure that bulls even service cows these days. But more and more and in every segment of this much-heralded service industry, we are made to feel like the cow.

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