Fighting The Symptoms

I try not to talk about the economic crisis, mostly because I don't know much about economics. Money has always been far too abstract for me to make clear sense of, and for most of my life I've had so little money, understanding it seemed somewhat moot. Doesn't do any good to try to understand something you'll never have enough of anyway. Better to stand in line for the gub-ment cheese and hope for the best.

However, one symptom I've noticed (with regards to the crisis) is a lack of humanity when dealing with the people on the other end of the counter. Modern life has afforded us many luxuries and new developments that, supposedly, make life easier. But as our finances have become more and more complicated in the 21st Century, more and more layers or banking have been added to the world around us, to help mediate the varied transactions we make in our lives. It was only within the last 30 years that the majority of people in America paid actual cash for nearly every transaction in their lives. Today, only the most sundry of purchases are paid for in that way. Money, for all intents and purposes, has become almost entirely electronic. And therein lies the problem.

To process the multitudes of electronic transactions that occur every day, there is a huge American workforce to handle the tasks. This creates an unusual dynamic with regards to the employee / customer relationship: where you used to always get something from a transaction like this (usually involving cash money or a service that was provided to you), now that everything is electronic, most transactions occur in the abstract. For example: I go to a counter to pay a bill. I hand over a card, it's swiped, and then handed back. No real money changed hands, and technically the service I got was that this clerk paid my bill for me. The actually service I was paying for is provided by an entirely other party, completely unrelated to the transaction that I'm involved in.

Weird, huh?

Now, the "counter" in the above example, is more often than not a phone these days, but the concept is the same. We make an abstract electronic payment to a third party person so another service we've received from someone else is now "covered." There are so many levels of removal from a real business interaction that it's easy to see how we achieved a financial crisis: people spend imaginary money to pay someone to process a service that we may or may not have gotten, regardless of the fact that we have real, actual money in the bank. Pretty soon, even the most diligent consumer, reaches a point when something doesn't add up at the end of the month.

Since school started in September, I've had three money snafu's with regards to PSU's Cashiering Department. That's one per month this term. (Provided, the term started at the end of September, and it's now the beginning of December.) First, PSU refused to accept a payment from me for a Dental Appointment, and yet wanted to penalize me for not making the payment. (I still don't understand that one.) Second, they mailed my Financial Aid check to my old address, after a full year of getting my checks at my current address. And then, today, I found out that PSU decided to mail my check to me rather than have me pick it up in the Cashier's Office, which goes against four years of picking up checks from PSU. (The fact that I could see the check sitting in an "outgoing" box behind the clerk didn't seem to matter. In the eyes of PSU, it was already out the building. No amount of begging could get her to give it to me.)

Now, I'm a fairly honest person who tries hard to be a good member of my community. I don't lie about important things, and I don't try to shirk my important responsibilities. I make efforts to pay my bills more or less on time, and outside of childhood indiscretions, have never stolen anything from anyone. This doesn't mean that I'm perfect, or that I don't make mistakes; actually, I probably screw up in some way once a day. I'm merely your average person trying to get by, day to day, with the hopes that I can achieve happiness and contentment in some form or another. More than anything, I have no interest in seeing other people suffer, nor do I feel like I shouldn't have sympathy for those around me.

What I find extremely interesting is that the current structure of the economy in America (and, I assume, most of the Westernized World) creates actual barriers toward allowing for a human understanding of these kinds of financial transactions. When I used to have to pay my bills in person, you developed a rapport with the clerks, and they sympathized with you when times were tough, or when something unusual occurred. Under the current structure, I can't even go to a counter anymore to pay my bills. PSU requires that you pay everything electronically, via their website. I can't even reach the same person twice when I call the Cashiering Office to complain, and when I call back a second time, there's never a record of the previous calls. I assume the (ironically) unwritten rule must be: If it's not written down, it no longer matters.

I've worked on the other side of the metaphoric counter at ACS (a company that handles farmed-out work from other corporate entities... another remove from the customer / service provided dynamic of the past). ACS tells you very specifically how to follow the correct corporate proceedures. Some of the rules at ACS included, "Never tell a customer that there is a manager that can field their question, even if there is one," and, "Even if they are in the right, you are never allowed to credit a customer's account." When a customer had actually been screwed over, and it was clear that we did the screwing, company policy mandated that I couldn't help them. The most I could do is listen to their problems, and say, "I'm sorry." Anything further could result in termination.

There came a point today, when I went to get my check, where the Kafkan nonsense of what was happening to me had reached its peak. The woman in front of me refused to escellate the problem to her superior, even after I asked her to. She explained that, even though I had been getting my checks at that window for four years, she had been in the Department for 18 months, and therefore, she should know better. I begged her to just hand me the check behind her, to which she replied that she would get fired for doing so. I finally posited the following scenario:

"So, what if I need to pay my rent, and because of this clerical error, I won't get my check for over a week. So now, I run the risk of being evicted during the week before finals. What do you think I should do?"

Her response: "Well, you should have thought ahead. I would drop out of school and look for a new place to live."

We have reached a point in our culture where we get paid to not care about those around us, at a time when we should be trying harder to be there for our community. I don't want to get lovey dovey and go live on a commune; I'm not even saying that we need to smash the current system and replace it with something better. (Though, I can't say I'm against that.) Just looking at the world rationally, I can't find a reason to not be concerned for the people around you. I got written up nearly every day I worked at ACS, because when a customer would ask for a little understanding, I dropped the performative role that I was being paid for, and honestly tried to find a way to work things out. There's no reason to spend your life at "counters," trying to defend yourself in a situation where you are poor and have no recourse. What possible harm can a poor person with no resources do to you? Now, look at the reverse of the situation: what can you do to help this person when they are at the end of their rope?

Can you really come up for an arguement to support being such an asshole?

In spite of everything, the woman at the counter today still refused to hand me my check. In frustration, I finally said, "Do you realize how inhumane your behavior is?" she looked at me and scowled.

"That's not my concern; I just work here."

I'm still in complete and total shock. Tonight, she will go home, open up her blog, talk about how well she did her job, eat a huge Middle Class Sized Dinner, and go to sleep feeling like a good member of her community.

My question is: is she? Am I the crazy one here?