Are you reading this blog on your hand held PDA while strolling through a shopping mall or sitting at the gate waiting for your plane to take off? Is that convenience of constant connectivity the nirvana of modern society?
Well, not for me. In May, 2004, I bought my first Palm Treo 600 from that now-defunct, but formerly globally-known brand called AT&T. I had “upgraded” from a standard cell phone, accepting the hype that all of the “functions” of a Palm Pilot, a lap top and a telephone could reasonably be incorporated into one device. I also imagined that AT&T’s abominable cell service would improve with the migration to GSM technology that the Palm phone uses.
Nothing has been further from the truth. I have discovered what I fear is the future of our service economy and trust me, we have more to fear than fear itself. Now on my fourth device in less than a year, each of the Palm Treo 600s has failed in various ways, including producing such an unbearable buzzing sound that the person on the other end usually hangs up. Two weeks ago, I found fifty cents in my pocket, a pay phone and used the Palm to look up the phone number of the person who had just terminated the call so that I could speak with him via good old land line technology. It’s great to be able to use a $500 phone as a substitute for an old fashioned phone book.
While the phones have been a huge disappointment, the crushing blow has been the cellular service provider itself. AT&T, which is now part of Cingular, this behemoth that promises excellent voice connectivity and brilliant customer service, proves only that the Soviet Union lives as Cingular. I have spent literally tens of hours on hold, talking to people in India who claim they have no supervisor, trying to access insurance Cingular fraudulently sold me. (They now say it does not cover the phone for which they sold me the policy. Imagine hearing THAT from your homeowner’s insurance company just after the house burns down.) And the cell service itself is, to say the least, spotty here in Los Angeles, hardly the remote outback.
I used to spend months at a time in Russia, and before that the USSR. I saw first hand the effects of colossal bureaucracies designed only to exist for their own sakes, having no interest whatsoever in the individuals they supposedly served. The stories of Soviet bureaucracy that became the staples of black humor were largely true. But the U.S. is now threatened not by former Soviet weapons so much as by the Soviet ways of companies like Cingular. The company is simply unmanaged and incapable of providing that basic of capitalism: value for the dollar.
Over time, Cingular and others like it will go the way of the USSR. They will implode because they are so large and so poorly run that they forget their mission.
Until then, we suffer with higher costs for providing lower quality service even as expectations increase. And the government all the while encourages consolidation , which leads to the very monopolies we thought should be ended with the break up of AT&T twenty years ago.
Progressives should lead the charge to demand accountability, something all Americans will support. Deregulation that leads to Soviet service might be the first truly national call to arms against the right’s insistence that what’s good for Cingular is good for the country. On the other hand, if that call is placed on the Cingular network, it probably won’t go through.