The sun is shining, the fire threat is low, and for the first time in 25 years, no part of California is experiencing drought. Except, of course, in the hope and joy department.
It's mid-January, which means the holidays are well and truly over and any fanciful glow the prospect of a “new” year held as it approached has already faded into a grim reality.
Of course I want to face this year determined to be a happier, kinder, more empathetic and more fair person. But just as it's hard to pay taxes honorably knowing that millionaires and billionaires are getting away with theirs, it's hard to muster energy for self-improvement when every news cycle brings evidence that an alarming number of people are perfectly willing to believe that black is white, that science is fake, that we should all cook with beef tallow and failing to stop when told to do so by an unidentified ICE agent is, apparently, punishable by death.
Plus, all the water everyone has told us to drink may be full of microplastics.
Look, now I'm getting angry again. Which is a lot to bear in 2025. Luckily, I just discovered a stash of surviving Christmas Peppermint M&M's (which may or may not contain beef tallow) and, equally important, I have a plan to make everyone's lives better.
(At least until the midterm elections, when we'll find out once and for all if this democratic experiment has any hope of lasting another year.)
Actually, it's very simple: we must demand the resurrection of customer service and put large numbers of well-paid and trained employees back in charge.
Oh really. I know it's fun and supposedly “convenient” to be able to do our banking/shopping/traveling/bill-paying/ticket-buying/food-ordering/health-monitoring/everything else through a series of apps, websites, and self-checkout kiosks.
But the lack of trained and helpful humans is getting out of control.
How many of us have stood around, staring wildly for help, when the supermarket checkout sensors failed to register a carton of eggs that is clearly in the bagging area and there is only one store employee tasked with assisting 20 or more delicate machines?
Or did you search in a panic for the payment confirmation email that we may or may not have received because we forgot to take a screenshot of an online transaction that is now being questioned via some annoying email with a DO NOT REPLY return address?
A friend of mine recently went to see her doctor for ongoing treatment for her arthritic hands and was told she needed to fill out all of her personal information, including her medical history, again because the office had changed systems. Apparently, the job of transferring file information was too difficult (read: expensive) to do with software, so it was handed over to… patients. “Don't worry,” said the guy sitting directly in front of the office computer. “You can do it now on your phone.”
Yes, that won't take any time or effort, and did I mention she was there to get treatment for her arthritis? hands?
The abandonment of any notion of customer service, now often called “customer support” or, better yet, “customer support” (as in, we will help you by directing you to our website or app, which may or may not be useful or working), is never clearer than when one travels.
Horrible last-minute flight delays and cancellations have become so common that airlines now recommend booking an extra day or two at each end of the trip. In other words, in addition to the cost of your actual flight, you should be prepared to pay even more in time or money because airlines certainly aren't.
On a long-planned vacation trip to London and Antwerp, Belgium, in December, our flight from LAX was abruptly moved to the next day: no warning, no explanation, no American Airlines staff at the gate. Just a series of alerts that those who had the AA app received, along with the assurance that those who qualified would receive email vouchers for room and board. Living in the Los Angeles area (although a 90-minute drive from LAX at that time of day), we were out of luck: we could pay hundreds of dollars for round-trip taxi fare or book our own hotel near the airport.
(Other family members, who left via Charlotte, North Carolina, had it even worse: A malfunction trapped a plane full of people, including my son and his girlfriend, on the tarmac for five hours before they were released after midnight. When they finally located a real staff member, they were given vouchers to a motel that appeared, as Melissa McCarthy's character in “Spy” says, “so killer” that they decided to book their own.)
As if that wasn't enough to stop us from traveling again, we were victims of the big Eurostar shutdown on December 30, during which all trains in and out of the UK were abruptly canceled for over 24 hours due to a power grid failure in the Channel Tunnel.
We had just assured ourselves that we would soon board our train from Brussels when the news came over a loudspeaker in four languages.
Imagine, if you will, hundreds of travelers now stranded, crying out in English, French, Dutch and German in panic as they arrived at Brussels-Midi station, where a Eurostar agent, one, He stood up, not suggesting alternative means of reaching our destination, but handing out photocopied pages directing everyone to the Eurostar app and website.
Where there were no tickets available for days and the process of claiming a refund or compensation for accommodation and other expenses was an endless maze of questions that needed answering when all everyone wanted to know was how the hell we were going to get to London now.
With no flights available until January 3, days after we were due to leave Heathrow Airport, we finally rented a car, at appalling cost, and fled Europe, with some historic intensity, on a ferry landing at midnight from Dunkirk. (If it sounds funny, I'm not saying it right.)
What I mean is not that trips should always go smoothly: things break down, the weather changes, accidents happen. My point is that if you are a company that gets paid to get people from one place to another, you should have enough staff to help those people get to their destinations as quickly and smoothly as possible in case something goes wrong.
Instead of, you know, literally throwing them out on the street and forcing them to invent their own imperfect and very expensive DIY solutions.
Because that's what the digital age has turned us into: a DIY economy in which millions of jobs no longer exist, not because computers do the work, but because the work has been transferred, through computers, directly to the consumer.
Who increasingly has little or no choice in the matter. Try to get a car from a car rental agency without first booking it online; You could also try trading your watch and three chickens as payment.
It would be one thing if, by scheduling your own appointments, keeping track of your own medical exams, packing your own groceries, and filling out all the information needed to make your own plane, train, and car reservations, you got a discount.
But not; Half the time, corporations have the audacity to charge a service fee on top of the money they've saved by not hiring someone to do the job you, the consumer, just did.
Is it any wonder why people are so irritable nowadays?
Especially when, having done all the work only to be informed by alert that it was all in vain; They have to wait in line until the only cashier/manager/door agent available explains to them that they “only” need to manage their reservation/transaction online.
How much better it would be if there were real, trained and experienced people, in numbers large enough to avoid endless queues, to make customers feel like customers again, rather than isolated pioneers who quietly lost their minds in an effort to buy whatever goods and services companies were selling.
I'm not saying it would solve all our problems, but it would go a long way toward lowering the national temperature. It's amazing what a great, helpful interaction can do to lift everyone's spirits and make people feel respected and valued, as individuals with reasonable needs, and not just anonymous packets of credit card information and unfortunate moments of crisis.
Not to mention all the jobs and career paths, at all levels, that restoring customer service could provide.
Because being unemployed tends to make people feel quite irritated and also unhappy.
