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Your Call Is Important To Us

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Published : May 19th, 2014
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( 29 votes, 3.7/5 ) , 6 commentaries
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Category : Editorials

F unny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially funny in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human hand and pretty much the be-all and end-all of human culture. I hold a phone, therefore I am!

It’s not so funny that the places where it is most difficult to connect to a live human being are among the most critical activities, most particularly every branch of health care. Hospitals now operate under the entirely false and obviously dishonest premise that a robotic phone routing system is the best way to handle communications. Notice that, in the logic of this system, no distinction is made between mundane business and medical emergencies. Everybody who calls get’s the same perky robot —always a woman, by the way, in a dishonest attempt to provide false reassurance that a “caring” presence (Big Sister) is at the other end of the line. Whether you call about a billing error or having just shredded your foot in a rototiller, the message at the other end will always be democratically the same: “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)

I dwell on these matters because I spent an inordinate amount of time last week calling around to several hospitals and doctors offices to get some of my medical records for a lawsuit I am prosecuting against the manufacturer of a defective hip implant that gave me cobalt / chromium poisoning. Note also that we have contrived to make it nearly impossible to obtain our own medical records.

Now I am, going to reveal to you why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise, the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA. Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary life.

The biggest offender after medicine, of course, is banking. They don’t want to hear from you either. They enjoy the privilege of swindling you by both tiny-and-large increments on transaction payments and near-zero interest rates and mortgage contracts where no title record of collateral can be located, and that all works very nicely for them. But they’re too busy creaming off profits to talk to their customers. In both medicine and banking, even the few remaining human secretaries to whose answering machines calls are torturously routed will not return those phone calls. “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)

Now all of this raises a couple of questions. How did we get to this sorry place? And why are citizens not violently angry about it?

To some degree, this situation represents the sheer diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology. In a nation infatuated with technology, these entropic effects are always ignored. We just don’t want to hear about it, and our related infatuation with feel-good public relations bullshit spews a fog of concealment over it. We apparently like being deceived and don’t mind being tortured.

Robot phone answering systems also allowed corporations to off-load the cost of doing business onto their customers, mostly in the form of wasting vast amounts of their customers’ time. Included in the off-load was the cost of paying receptionists (as telephone answerers used to be quaintly called) and all their medical and retirement benefits — just another manifestation of the vanishing middle class, by the way, since a lot of women used to be employed that way (let’s skip the gender equality side-bar for now). After a while, the added privilege of companies being able to evade responsibility for their actions hugely outweighed the cost-saving advantage of firing some lower level employees.

It ought to be self-evident that this could only happen in a profoundly corrupt, dishonest, and degenerate society, because it took the form of a social compact that accepted this sort of behavior as okay. Doctors especially don’t want to be accessible to their customers. It enhances their aura of supernatural authority to be as unreachable as possible — and most of them these days are safely embedded in the protective corporate matrix one way or another as well. I suppose you can always pray to them and hope for a reply, since that is obviously the system they are trying to emulate. And, after all, this is an especially pious society. But try asking a plain question like, “how come you charged me $34,000 for four hours of anesthesia?” and you will be hung out to dry until the end of time.

As for outrage, I am frankly amazed that the various armed lunatics at large in America are so busy shooting up schools when many more people are actually being harmed, indeed ruined, by the health care “industry” and the banks.

If you have a theory about all this, please offer it up in the Comments department.

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James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
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There's a theory going around the alternative web media depicting drug and surgery Allopathic medicine as criminally being given a monopoly to treat degenerative diseases that make up 90% of medicine due to corrupt politics. The public is trained to believe by repitition of the propaganda, that it's earned it's stripes through proven science - which never occured. It posits further that a small group of six organized crime families control the Jesuits who stole the Vatican's gold in the middle ages and enlisted the Rothschilds as their bankers. With this gold they created a "superentity" over 400 years that secretly control nearly 43,000 corporations today through hundereds of agents. A study of suppressed history reveals the Jesuits are the master poisoners of history and use subtle poisons to disable the health of the public to insure their continued grip on power.

A sick population, though still functional, is far less likely to look for and show an interest in their various deceptions like fractional reserve banking and debt-based money creation by their Federal Reserve. In fact through toxic injury, the public is captured and even becomes defenders of what I call Monopoly Quack Medicine, vaccines, fluoride and other poison delivery systems. This chemically dumbing-down of the population through toxic chemicals in the air, water, food and medicine is explained by neurosurgeon Dr Russell Blaylock's youtube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB3xcN_eoPo

When the dollar collapses, I'm hoping this empire of control and deceit will also collapse and through the web the masses will finally discover these evil manipulators and remove their money and power so the people can be free of this secret and deceptive scourge and world populations can finally develop their health naturally and their money genuinely.



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Patience Folks! In "a world made by hand" we won't have to worry about such inconveniences, will we? Doctors? think more like Civil War remedies. Your leg hurts? we'll take care of that! Hand me that Hack-saw.
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I look forward to speaking with answering machines telling me how important my call is, for the simple reason that I can vent my anger ( or rather displeasure) by unloading a string of profanities and not offend anyone.
Its a great release. Almost a spiritual experience.

For example.

" Fucking hell you cock sucking arse holes, why in the bloody hell can't youse shit faced bastards give some dickwit a bloody job so i can get through to some other stupid mother….effer of a turd to lodge a legitimate complaint against the rat shit service I get at your third world bloody stupid fucked up company."

I never get a call back.
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"Your call may be monitored for quality control and training purposes"

:)
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Ok I'll bite.

COST CUTTING and AVOIDANCE OF RESPONSIBILITY are the two main drivers of what we all now have to suffer. There are some companies which do not want to get an email from customers so they either avoid putting a link on their website or make it so hard to find that customers give up. I must say that phone contacts are still available for most but often one gets through to a Call Centre in India and ends up speaking to somebody who is unable to speak English or who has such a strong accent that they are not able to be understood. And then you often speak to people who have a defined spiel and do not answer the question you actually asked: either because answering correctly requires a level of intelligence not present of because the truth would mean accepting liability for negligence on the company's part.

I would suggest that many people enjoy the email contact as they do not get enraged with bad company misconduct and because they do not have to confront a public relations brick wall. But then what comes back via email is much like the above. You often get a cut and paste response which totally avoids an answer to the question being asked.

Welcome to the modern world and to decaying first world societies.
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There is only ONE answer that will work. Everyone who gets an answering machine must HANG UP IMMEDIATELY ! ! Leave NO message. Since this solution would have to be UNIVERSAL (accepted by everyone) it will never be implemented. This society, divided against itself, will never stick together; even on this critical issue.
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There's a theory going around the alternative web media depicting drug and surgery Allopathic medicine as criminally being given a monopoly to treat degenerative diseases that make up 90% of medicine due to corrupt politics. The public is trained to be  Read more
sam site - 6/3/2014 at 6:16 PM GMT
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