One has only to read the local newspapers, if anyone does so anymore, or listen to the network or other news channels to experience on a daily basis the deterioration of our society. Young people committing suicide, mothers killing their children, ICE and police officers killing people mistaken as suspects, questionable calls by referees in sports that raise the issue of nefarious underlying motivations, and literally thousands of business bankruptcies, many the result of bogus business plans and financings.
My personal attention recently has focused on how this deterioration has become evident in our day-to-day dealings with the major business institutions of our generation: delivery behemoths, credit card companies, and banks, that are straining to maintain contact with industry progress. Take these examples:
The largest delivery giant of them all dropped several large packages off at our doorstep and, notwithstanding my wife’s plea that we were not expecting any deliveries, left three of the packages without a word. Luckily my wife was kind enough to track down the resident at the address posted on the packages, and they picked them up later in the day. When my wife called the company’s headquarters earlier, she was told to throw the packages in the trash or use the contents ourselves. Just think what the value of the contents must have been if they were not worth the cost of a local driver picking them up and delivering them to the designated address literally a couple of blocks away.
Next is the situation in which our credit cards were being fraudulently used by those who somehow deviously obtained our confidential card information. The credit card companies willingly issued new cards to my wife and me, but when I submitted my cards to pay for a purchase, they were rejected. This happened several times and we were provided with the explanation that the credit card company wanted to make certain that we were the proper users. How in the world does rejecting the card identify the valid cardholder?
Finally, my experience at becoming a mobile phone on-line bank customer. My daughter demonstrated the ease of accessing the proper app to me and opened such an account for my personal and business use. Life was good, until that fateful day when the computer in the sky no longer liked my password and rejected my advances. Worse of all, when I called the telephone number on the screen announcing my rejection, I initiated a call with a bank representative who, after several minutes of personal questions, announced that he only handles inquiries from clients in California. The next effort on my behalf was rejected because I was not located in Kansas City. How difficult would it have been for my app to indicate that questions of users should be routed through the telephone service of their local branch, and following the “keys” to the desired area of inquiry?
These bumps in our systems would not, and did not, occur in such systems during my initial decades on earth and I seriously doubt they would exist today if these systems were constructed and tested not only by those knowledgeable about electronics but also by those educated in business and customer relations. It might take a little longer to complete, but the result would beat the pants off the equipment and programs we are plagued with today.
