A Day in the Life

In the private sector too 'Big is beautiful' became old-hat and the
'lean, mean and efficient' became the new fashion.

So, now, instead of your problem with the goods, service or whatever,
getting lost in a maze of bureaucracy, it gets farmed out to some
know-nothing-and-care-less brain-numbed flunky at a distant call-centre
who can't deviate from the script without getting a cut in wages, who
can't sort out the problem because there isn't an appropriate category
in the software that was written by someone with no knowledge of the
business and English as a third language, and they can't deal with it
in writing because the office where they could solve it all in a couple
of minutes no longer exists and all the staff have been made redundant
and now all work selling bland processed pre-packaged meat-flavour
sandwich-type meals in the massive retail park that used to be an iron
foundry, while the product itself is mass-produced in some tiny
third-world country by unschooled children who work for the equivalent
of 3p a day and make thousands of the things during each 16 hour shift,
then the goods are transported half-way around the world in some leaky,
polluting rust bucket before being dumped on some nameless dock in the
middle of the night to be transported overnight by half-asleep
underpaid and harried truck drivers in knackered totally lethal
unroadworthy trucks and delivered to some vast out of town
hyper-mega-market where the night-shift of working mothers who've been
up all day with junk-food-overdosed hyper-active toddlers and bored
sullen older kids who can't go to school because there is no-one insane
enough to teach the un-socialised little psychopathic sadists that
video-game morality is no way to cope with a complex modern society,
and especially not for teachers wages that wouldn't be enough to get a
mortgage on a condemned rabbit hutch, and then the hyper-mega-market
opens 24 hours a day so that you can drag yourself, half-asleep after
working 13 hour shifts to produce some information-rich pile of paper
that you know no-one will ever want or need to read using technology
that makes the job three times as difficult as it used to be while
using six-times as much electricity and ten-times as many scarce trees,
your brain is throbbing with commercial jingles that cause an almost
Pavlovian response in your tired fingers as weary eyes fall upon each
bright package that offers you financial, sexually and worldly success
just by heating up its contents in a microwave - a microwave that you
still are paying for on your credit card - and sitting down in front of
the tv to some massive-prize giving quiz for those who seem to be able
to fill their minds up with all manner of useless context and
relevance-free trivia, before falling asleep on the sofa, then waking
with a start because you remember that you have to cal the 'free' 24
call-line because some company you've never heard off - and suspect
don't really exist beyond a heading on their letter paper - are saying
that they are a debt-collection agency and they are taking you to court
to because you haven't paid a credit card bill, which only last week
you explained to the credit card company's own 24 hour call line, you
hadn't paid because in fact it was a credit, not a debit, that they
themselves had cocked up when you complained a week before to someone
else on the cal line who had confirmed that the matter had been fed
into the computer and was - therefore - rectified, but when you pick up
the phone to make the call you get a pre-recorded message giving you a
number to ring where a pre-recorded voice will tell you why your phone
has been cut off, then seventeen phone calls later - all made on your
mobile because your landline has been disconnected and even though it
is not your fault the company can't re-connect you because 'the
computer is down' you discover it is because the credit card company
has double-debited you bank account for the outstanding debit that is
really a credit - or was that a credit that was really a debit - and
therefore sent your bank account into the red, but you can't sort that
out because the bank only now exists as an internet site and you can't
get to the web page because your phone has been disconnected, so you
give up in despair and go and get a beer from the fridge only to
discover it is past its sell-by date, but you no longer care and drink
it anyway, only to wake up in hospital because some third-world
sub-contracted brewer discovered that it was cheaper to use anti-freeze
rather than hops or malt to make beer, and then hospital sends you home
early because no-one is insane enough to be a nurse on the wages they
pay, so you head back home with an upset stomach from the cook-chill
food not being served at the correct temperature, a viral infection you
didn't have before you were admitted, only to find that your house has
been repossessed and the bailiffs are just leaving with your state of
the art telephone in lieu of payment, leaving you with a 24 hour
help-line number, so you sit down in the street only to find you mobile
has a flat battery.