Please hold.

Because your call is incredibly fucking important to us.

And the next available representative will be with you to lie to you in just a moment. Your call may be randomly monitored to insure that our thralls are kept in fear of their jobs and on message.

So yesterday I get email – early – asking if anyone else in my building had dead phone lines.
Then another email.
Then a dawning recognition that it’s the whole building.
Then an afternoon email that it’s more than one building; maybe the whole block, and that so-and-so is calling the phone company.

And now we pause in our exciting adventure for a word about from our sponsor: SBC. The Bastards out of San Antonio. Yet another disease vector that found our 28th state a febrile stink hole in which to breed before going pneumonic out across the land. Another greasy byproduct from what the inimitable Molly Ivins calls the “National Laboratory for Bad Government”. Another reason why my friends in the Plutocratic Theocracy of Texas need to get the hell out of there.

SBC just sucks. And they ran the time-honored Monopolist Playbook on how to bust a market page by page, while everyone here hopped up and down trying to get the attention of anyone who would listen and tell them that this was a Very Bad Idea.

Step One: Spread a LOT of cash around and convince local pol’s to redraft the rules on monopoly, out-of-state ownership, etc. Big media campaign smearing the native phone companies (Swift Dialers for Truth?), but mostly lots of the folding green stuff for the Springfield and Chicago political party coffers.

Step Two: Massively overpay for what you’re buying. Like No Limit poker, if you can raise your working class opponent a jillion dollars you can just blow them out, hand after hand.

Step Three: Do the deal. Buy out Ameritech. Change the letterhead. Do a sassy little victory dance, get drunk and fuck your secretary in the server room.

Um, where are you going to get the cash to cover the crazy costs associated with ramming your way into the marketplace?

Glad you asked.

Step Four: Fire everybody. Whack everybody from the managers on down. Just lay utter waste to the whole human infrastructure, especially those highly paid mobile crews who, y’know, actually go out and make the shit work.

Step Five: Offer crazy deals and a whole hatful of wildly different service plans that conform to no economic model known to humans.

Can’t you just feel the Enron Magic?

So the system crashes. Service implodes.

The twelve-year-olds who were hired straight out of remedial math to take the place of veteran professionals start showing up at customer’s houses to “fix stuff”, but only after 6:00 ‘cause that’s when Mommy gets off work, and they need her to drive them around in the Big Cool SBC trucks.

They come to the door with Fluke tools and vacuum tube testers, barometers and dowsing rods, tin whistles and mood rings and after staring intently at the phone for 20 minutes, they take the laminated “What to tell the Sheep…” card out of their pocket and say “’s line trouble. Have to go back and check some things out. Someone will contact you.”

Contact me…how? By pigeon? Town Crier? Using the same Awesome Telepathic Powers that Junior just used to diagnose the phone problem?

But Junior has already left: Mom was double-parked and “The OC” starts in, like, ten minutes!

Care to guess what’s coming next?

Step Six: As public furor rises, get all pissy about it. On teevee. On the radio. Blame the customer. Blame the media. Blame everybody but your own selves.

The suicide rate among help desk operators jumps to 90% (kidding.) Being paid Wal-Mart wages to tell ridiculous, scripted lies to people that are screaming at you, to cover up for your fat-assed bosses who obviously don’t give a shit about you, or the people they’re supposed to serve is apparently more soul-destroying that the pricing model predicted.

Step Seven: Hire the Mayor’s Brother to front for you. A little expensive, since in this case the new hire was Bill Daley.

Step Eight: Grudgingly hire back a few of the seasoned professionals you fired because they were too costly. Seems like paying to have a few fire extinguishers around for when the conflagration comes wasn’t such a ridiculous expense after all.

Step Nine: Raise those rates…even though you sorta kinda promised you wouldn’t, but now who the fuck cares and who the fuck can stop you. As Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine used to say, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

People were most definitely warned, but people did not listen.

And so the phone service (and DSL) is down at casa driftglass, and has been for two days now (just heard it'll be dead 'til Monday which, while being a cool garage band name, still sucks dog water.) Arriving at my day gig far away from home, I call the Service Center and get a perky waif on the line reading her Very Happy Script with oddest halts and stops you ever heard. Sorta like Words by Mickey Mouse…but Music by Christopher Walken.

“No, mr. Dri ftgla ss, we have no reported pro blems at that add re sss.”

“But I’m know this was reported yesterday.”

“We have no re core dof that tran sact shun. Hold on while I test the lie..n.”

And I hear a tapping on the line.

Morse code?

(h-e-l-p m-e. f-a-m-i-l-y b-e-i-n-g h-e-l-d)

“My tesss t has shown that there is lie…n int er fear

(a-t g-i-t-m-o. I l-i-v-e- i-n f-e-a-r)

“ance. A truck will be dis patch ed”

(f-o-r-c-e-d t-o l-i-e.)

“and if the pro blem is not res olv ed by 5”

(a-n-d g-i-v-e s-h-i-t-t-y s-e-r-v-i-c-e.)

“the serve ice man will leave a card."

(N-U-K-E T-E-X-A-S!)

Then a supervisor suddenly takes over and She of The Halting Cipher disappears, presumable sent back to Room 101 or to whatever telecommunications gulag they dispatch the “non-team players” for Customer Service “Re-Education.”

A bored audioanimatronic child now tells me that if they don’t fix whatever the fuck they had done wrong by tomorrow that I may qualify for a credit on my next bill, so I’m reduced to poaching a little gray-market bandwidth like a pitiable digital junkie to support my vices and reading the news off the pulped flesh of dead trees.

And that, in a nutshell, is where we are today.

Service peeled down to its bare bones because actual expertise and good tech or customer support actually costs. News crash-dieted down to Runaway Bride and Michael Jackson bilge because actual, in-depth reporting on the things that affect people’s lives actually costs money. The social safety net being shredded because actually protecting citizens against the vicissitudes of time, disease, back luck and the harsh downside of market economies actually costs money, and far too many people don’t want to pay for anything that doesn’t immediately benefit them right this minute.

Here’s what you get, America: cheap shoes and a $600 tax cut.

And here’s what it costs: shitty service, ravaged schools, working harder ever day for less, WalMart careers, skyrocketing costs for health care, child care and retirement. And a pervasive sense of meanness seeping into our groundwater. A feeling that it’s more and more OK with Washington, Main Street and Jesus to live a, “Fuck the other guy” life.

What we gain are market efficiencies – which are good – and the concentration of unchecked and unbalance power into fewer and fewer and hands, which is disastrous.

What we get is us – all of us -- playing a rigged game, pitted carefully against each other in the cruelest, Hobbsean “War of all against all” kind of way at a time when we most need to be working together. Because while were all busy looking eyeing each other like Fred C. Dobbs guarding his loot, the men that put us in the trick bag are walking right on past us and looting the nation, waging war on a tissue of lies in our name, and running civil society and the Constitution slowly through the wood chipper.

(And, yes, yoking Hobbs and Dobbs together in the same paragraph is a alliterative and philosophical bank shot I have been dreaming of for years.)

And what they will leave behind for us to cope with is a ruined reputation everywhere else on the planet, a despoiled environment, a generation unprepared to make its way in the world and a debt that will render us a nation of peonage hookers putting on donkey shows for Chinese Bankers for the next fifty years to pay off.

The good news is, this is all man-made. No inviolable law of nature is forcing us to be this way. It is an artifact of the policies of a few wealthy men who hate this country and see it as nothing more than a pot to plunder, and a few Armageddon Cultists who see bring our beautiful Earth to ruin as part of Jesus’ Exciting Retirement Plan. And what evil men can do, good men can undo, even though it’s very hard and sometimes dispiriting work, so I take that as life’s little lesson for me from this small interruption in service.

Well, that and Fuck The Phone Company.