No More Bureaucracy

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 call 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 call 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.

(Another one of my earliest – see here for example)