Is that it?

Well, no. Hold on a minute. You may get me wrong.

You see, I’m a normal, red-blooded American.

That means that I find bureaucracy—in all of its forms, and with all of its trappings—about as welcome as a case of the stomach flu.

And today, there doesn’t seem to be much of anyplace that I can get away from that kind of stuff.  I can run into it doing something as simple as reconciling my bank statement.

Say I find an error, or a problem comes up.  When I call the bank, what I get first is recorded music.  When eventually I get a human, it is a young lady who seems to have been trained in the airline-stewardess mode of intonation:

"I’m sorry, Sir, but this is Customer Services.  We can help you select personalized checks in more than nineteen different motifs, including ‘Have a Nice Day;’  and we can also arrange for you to receive our Cash Gobbler 24-hour automated-withdrawal card.  For information regarding your account, you’ll have to call BC-MIS-X, Extension 439."

And what if I go to a store?

"Is this shirt cut full or tapered?"

"Uh, gee, what does the label say?"

The clerk isn’t really dumb or unhelpful;  it’s just that his position within a vast merchandising chain doesn’t either demand or entitle him to know much about what he’s selling.   To find out anything about the shirt, I’d have to contact some ultra-specialized shirt buyer somewhere in the labyrinth of corporate headquarters.

I suppose we ought to leave automotive and electronic products out of this discussion.  Anybody who’s ever bought one that didn’t work, or that didn’t work in quite the way the designers had in mind, and has gone through the chain of letters and phone calls, and more letters and phone calls, that it can take to get the fool thing working or replaced, knows that to call too much attention to this particular area of bureaucracy would be almost unsporting.