Once upon a time not so very long ago, someone invented, H.I.V.R. and the world was good. People answered the telephone, and H.I.V.R. was used as it was intended to be used, to help you if all humans were already talking on the phone. H.I.V.R. was used to allow you to leave a message for someone who was away from their desk and to allow you to connect to someone else who perhaps was at their desk without the need of hanging up and calling again. Then the BEAN COUNTERS got their grubby hands on it, and the world has been a darker place ever since.

Just what do I mean by BEAN COUNTERS? Perhaps the best definition of BEAN COUNTER goes something like this:

BEAN COUNTER,  noun (descriptive noun) A bean counter is an illiterate antisocial accountant who is incapable of interpersonal relations with other people and desires that all other people in the world be made to conform to their belief system. They have no regard for the rights of others when profit is to be made and believe lying, cheating and stealing are correct and proper business practices just as long as these practices produce profit for them or their company. These same individuals regard as the ultimate evil anyone who attempts to use their methods against them. PS Please do not confuse BEAN COUNTERS with legitimate accountants. Most accounts are decent people who are simply trying to make a living and see to it that the people they work for are not cheated by the government.

As an example, quite a few years ago there was a family owned coffee company. (Please note that I do not name that family owned company as this would identify the company which we will discuss next.) This family owned company sold relatively decedent coffee (as good as it is possible to sell in mass market cans) and obviously made a reasonable profit as a much larger company purchased this company primarily for the name. The very fist thing that the larger companies BEAN COUNTERS did was cut the quality of the coffee beans used, change the grind so that they could place less coffee in the can and told the public that this new type of coffee grind made just as much as a pound of the old coffee. What they did not tell the public was the new coffee tasted like somebodies boiled socks.

What was the result? Coffee sales plummeted. The BEAN COUNTERS used low-quality beans and replaced those with even lower quality beans then ground it finer making the brew more  bitterly foul tasting. Today that once proud family coffee name is synonymous with crap coffee instead of quality coffee. PS: The moronic BEAN COUNTERS still do not understand and are trying to find crappier junk beans to offset the fact that fewer people can choke down their crap.

Now companies are doing the same thing with their telephone systems. I have to admit, I called a small company the other day and a human answered. I almost had a heart attack from the shock. Today in almost every case when you call a company which has more than, perhaps, a-dozen employees, the first thing you will always be required to talk to is their customer avoidance system. Why do I call them customer avoidance systems? Try calling you telephone provider or the cable company and time just how long it takes you to get to talk to a live human. Worse yet most of the time when you do eventually are connected, after going through at least five to ten levels of menu and wasting anywhere from five minutes to five hours of your personal time, you will be talking to someone from Bhopol or Kuala Lumpur instead of someone in the good old USA. Some companies are actually trying to charge you for the privilege of talking to a human.

Why is this happening? In very simple terms BEAN COUNTERS. In the opinion, of the BEAN COUNTERS who seem to congregate at the top of many large companies it simply cost's too much to waste time talking to a customer. They often believe it is far better to make, what they call customer service, as unusable as possible.

Want a few examples. If your telephone company overcharges you; you, will spend on the average of ten to twelve hours of your time trying to get this corrected. In most cases, you will be told that you must call a different department, no they can not transfer you, and when after several hours, sometimes  perhaps days, of waiting you will be told no; the department that sent you here will be the only one which can help you, so you need to call them back. WARNING: If you are five seconds late in paying them, they will turn your phone off! This is called customer service. PS to the WARNING If your phone is turned off for late pay; first you must pay the bill then the late fee then the late fee to the late fee the the reconnect fee then the late fee to the reconnect fee and then you must wait, usually, three to five days for your phone to be turned back on. Incidentally this DOES include the invalid charge, often bogus charge,  that you have been trying to get them to take off the bill.  (Yes, I am talking about one of the large phone companies, which due to the fact that they have attorneys on retainer, and I would be forced to hire an attorney to defend myself from them, must, unfortunately, remain unnamed.)

Unfortunately, much of this lies at the feet of the consumer as we tend to put up with this. Very few of us complain about this to the companies involved, partially because we believe perhaps correctly that the BEAN COUNTERS will ignore anything we say.

For those of you who do not believe, that you, yourself, are partially to blame for the condition of the customer avoidance systems in use today, I leave with this quote from what many people in the country think is one of our greater presidents.

"It is the duty of an elected official to ignore the will of the-people when he believes that the-people are wrong!" John F. Kennedy.

Perhaps the  proper paraphrase of PT Barnum?

"You CAN fool most of the people all of the time!"