In this era of automated everything, where businesses large and small are doing their best to reduce costs, one aspect of most businesses has become the automated telephone system. Such systems come in two varieties. Those that aren’t excessively frustrating and those that are.

Among the systems that are most frustrating are those with a long menu and no option for anything besides specific topics that aren’t what you’re calling about. So after nine options, none of which relate to the subject of your call, you have to go through the menu and guess which option is the closest to what you’re calling about. That gets followed with a second menu that often turns out to have nothing to do with the subject you’re calling about. If you’re fortunate, you may find what you called about.

Then there’s the system that actually asks you the subject of your call. Except… it often doesn’t recognize the words you’re using because it’s only programmed to “accept” certain words.

The best systems, to my mind, are like the one used by my local pharmacy. If you know your prescription number and your phone number, you can refill the prescription automatically. If you don’t, you can switch directly to a pharmacy technician. If it’s after hours you can leave your name and number and describe your problem, and someone will call you back during working hours – and they do.

On the other hand, there’s the current IRS system, where there’s been no way to get an answer to your questions either online or by telephone for two months, and there’s no way to reach a live person. My inquiry wasn’t vital. After three months, I just wanted to know when I might get my refund. Even though I filed electronically, and received a confirmation, the automated system couldn’t even find my return. I’ll certainly survive, but there are millions of people out there who are facing financial distress… and a whole lot of them are in the same limbo…and for them it’s serious.

Even before the coronavirus hit, for anything other than a simple problem, it took an hour or more to reach a real person. I know. Last year, the IRS lost a check I sent them for an amended return [because you can’t file amended returns electronically, nor pay them electronically]. I knew the USPS didn’t lose the check because the Treasury cashed it, but it took three months for them to acknowledge that they found it [and I spent HOURS on hold waiting to talk to a real person].

Computers, automated answering systems, and incompetence can combine to create even more frustration. My wife didn’t get a bill on schedule from a financial institution for her credit card and wanted to know what she owed. So she called the institution last week. Even with her credit card number, Social Security number, address, and email, they wouldn’t tell her unless she could tell them what her last purchase had been. She had several small purchases recently, but she couldn’t find the receipts or give them exact numbers. Without that exactitude, they wouldn’t reveal her balance. She could, of course, go online and set up access to her account, something that she’s been reluctant to do, and which would just create another system with another password. They did agree to send another copy of the bill to the email on file and by regular mail. So far, she’s seen neither.

Then there were the pastries we ordered. Somehow the vendor’s system decided to send them to our daughter, because that was where the last order went. When we discovered that – three minutes after we got a confirmation email – we called the vendor… and ended up on hold. Twenty minutes later, someone answered. We corrected the shipping address. The person on the other end assured us everything was taken care of. Four days later, the pastries ended up at our daughter’s house. I’m sure she and her family will enjoy them.

Rules are critical in games and government, and there are two aspects to rules: (1) whether they’re fair and (2) whether they’re enforced fairly.

In both games and government, it’s sometimes difficult to determine the fairness of rules and enforcement, but these days, with the growth of both national and personal recording media, i.e., cellphones, it’s gotten easier to show unfairness in both the rules and their enforcement.

For example, in the 2018 NFC championship game between the Saints and the Rams, a Ram defensive back slammed helmet-to-helmet into a Saint receiver as he was about to receive the ball, clearly illegal under the rules. No penalty was called, even though millions saw the impact. Later, the NFL admitted it was a bad no-call. Effectively, that no-call changed the outcome of the game. It cost the Saint’s players money and the chance to play in the Superbowl. The problem wasn’t the rules; it was the enforcement of the rules.

The same situation exists in government today as well, particularly in terms of police enforcement of the criminal codes. When enforcement is badly handled, it often goes viral, as in George Floyd’s death and in dozens of other instances.

But when the “rules” are flawed, that’s often not as obvious, particularly when seemingly “objective” rules or laws aren’t nearly as objective as their proponents claim.

Requiring a photo ID to vote is simple for many people. They already have one. But if you don’t, it can be difficult and time consuming to obtain one because virtually every form of ID requires confirmation, either other ID cards or a birth certificate, and if you don’t have a birth certificate in your possession, it can be time consuming, and sometimes almost impossible to get a certified copy without supporting documentation or appearing in person, and given most bureaucracies, can easily take hours, if not longer, spent waiting. This places a far heavier time and loss of income burden on lower-income workers.

So does having elections on weekdays. Most professionals can juggle their schedules or just take time off to go vote. A significant proportion of hourly-paid workers can’t… not without losing money, which is hard when every dollar goes toward basic necessities.

College admissions based on SAT or ACT scores were designed with the purpose of creating a way to evaluate applicants for college more fairly. And they worked reasonably well [for those applying] when the majority of applicants came from upper middle class or upper class white families. It’s clear that they’re far less accurate in evaluating abilities of applicants from different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.

Part of the “rules” problem lies in the fact that most rules are created by elites of some sort, who write the rules, i.e., laws, based on their background and understanding… and then attempt to apply them to everyone, with enforcement based on the same assumptions. This works reasonably well in homogenous societies, but far less well in societies with significant numbers of differing ethnic/cultural groups… and much of the world is becoming less homogenous… and the previous homogenous majority, in more and more nations, is either failing to act or reacting adversely… which can and has led to civil unrest and violence.

Because we really needed to do some cleaning out – understandably necessary after living in the same house for almost twenty-seven years – about two weeks ago I rented a construction-sized dumpster, not because I thought we had that much “stuff” that had outlived its usefulness, but because the smaller sizes came with restrictions on what we could put in them, and the range of what I knew we had to get rid of exceeded those restrictions. I also rented it because, first, there were items that wouldn’t fit in my old Tahoe, and, second, because the local dump is a twenty minute drive from the house – one way.

The dumpster arrived on schedule, and I started disposing, and, after four days of intermittent serious effort, and my creative use of a moving dolly, I’d managed to lever and haul the two hundred pound plus broken down massage chair out of the garage where it had been residing for half a decade, because, unlike other appliances, the one we wanted didn’t include – even for a fee – the removal of the old one. Then there were the cheap and battered veneer over particleboard or oriented strand board computer desks, or the set of iron patio chairs that ended up in the storeroom after we discovered that the non-removable castors had a tendency to snap and break in a way that was not repairable [at least not without access to a machine shop and welding gear]. And there was more… including a raft of barely usable and decrepit devices, the incredibly heavy “portable” dog fence that a relative had gifted to us [and which turned out to be totally useless], the non-functional stereo designed for cassette tapes…

But… after all the junk was in the dumpster, the need for true-deep cleaning became obvious, and my ingenious wife presented me with a brand-new power washer she’d ordered in advance to really deep clean the deck and the brick and concrete patios below. The catch was that I had to assemble it, because it came in a box – since, of course, there wasn’t one to be had in Cedar City. The instructions suggested that “five minutes” assembly time was all that was required. I’m not a mechanic, but I’m reasonably handy, or I thought I was. It took almost two hours, one hour of which was finding two screws the size of the ones that weren’t included in the box, which was necessary if I didn’t want to wait a week or two for the manufacturer to send what they hadn’t included.

Then, it took me almost an hour to figure out how to actually operate the machine. I’ve flown military helicopters. In the early days of computers I actually replaced components to improve performance. Part of the problem was that the directions never mentioned how to change the pressure coming out of the nozzle. So it was trial and error.

After that, it actually took less time to power-wash more than eighty linear feet of concrete sidewalks and brickwork than it did to assemble and learn to operate the machine.

But it seems in our ever more technical world, matters get more complicated, even when they shouldn’t. The afternoon after the power-washer fiasco, a new printer arrived [by delivery because we have no computer stores anymore in Cedar City] to replace the old one, a printer that, although not that old, had decided only to print in two of four colors, even after “cleaning” and the purchase of brand new cartridges, which also I’d had to order online. Now, over the years, I’ve gone through close to a score of printers. So I thought it wouldn’t be that hard. Wireless printers… no sweat.

Wrong. First, the on-screen directions on the printer stopped at “choose wireless or Ethernet.” I found a way around that. Then the damned printer wanted to connect to the wrong network and wouldn’t let me enter the right one. So I shut everything down and started over. I got it connected to the right network, and it said everything was fine. Except that it wouldn’t print because the printer was “off-line.” The computer settings wouldn’t let me change that, either. So I had to delete the printer from the computer and reinstall it. It works fine now, but to go through essentially three and a half installations?

My wife won’t let me print the details of the three hours it took her to work out the installation of a “simple” additional app to our satellite TV system.

I could go on for pages about all the stuff that’s supposed to be easy to install and use… and it never is.

How about you?

Lots of well-meaning people have said this, or words to that effect over the years, generally after an egregious example of police brutality or a miscarriage of justice against blacks has ignited tempers and buildings. I’ve been one of those who said that… and the words are indeed true. But those words have become, it appears, merely an excuse for not doing very much after the violence dies down.

As a result, the injustices and brutality continue… and, when another terrible instance goes viral, so does the violence. That’s understandable… and unfortunate… because people get even more angry and frustrated when unfairness persists and major problems don’t get fixed.

Often, officials and politicians say it takes time. Oh? How much time did it take to get massive stimulus packages out to largely white-owned businesses? How much time did it take to get a massive tax break for the upper 1%? Trump can come up with an Executive Order to punish Twitter overnight, because they fact-checked his tweets, but he doesn’t seem inclined to deal with a double standard of justice, possibly because he thinks, as he did in the Charlottesville white power rally, that there are “good people” among the racists.

Many of the people who go along with the racists aren’t truly evil people, but they don’t understand just how pervasive the structural injustices are, and when someone attempts to remedy the problems, all they see is the government spending money on people they perceive as undeserving, and money that’s not spent on them.

What they don’t see, and often can’t or won’t see, is that almost every law on the books is enforced more harshly on people of color, and there are years of studies to prove it.

And, in the meantime, those who use the violent reaction to the latest example of blatant police brutality as an excuse for doing little or nothing might ask themselves how patient you’d be if you, your parents, your grandparents, and your ancestors had been subject to such brutality for roughly 400 years… and the politicians and courts still hadn’t put an end to it, in a country that hypocritically has praised itself for equality under the law for over 200 years.

Those touting the need for the U.S. to get back to “normal” as soon as possible are essentially relying on the argument that the coronavirus is dangerous just to the elderly and people with certain underlying conditions, and that those people should stay at home, while the rest of the nation returns to “business as usual.”

The problem with this argument is that there aren’t just a handful of people with underlying conditions, which include those who are obese, smokers, and people with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, lung disease, chronic and severe kidney problems, and compromised immune systems. According to a paper recently published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, 45% of adult Americans fit at least one high-risk category. But it left out people in institutionalized settings, and in nursing homes in particular, which have accounted for a hugely disproportionate number of deaths.

In effect, too many Americans want to think of the high-risk coronavirus population as just senior citizens and people with underlying conditions, which they believe consist of a small percentage of Americans. In fact, that “small” population is somewhere around half of adult America and quite possibly more. That’s not a “tiny fraction” of the United States.

And for those in that category who catch the coronavirus and have symptoms, early statistics show that roughly twenty percent will require hospitalization. Half of those who survive will require lengthy medical care, and early U.K. studies estimate that roughly as many people as those who died will be permanently disabled and unable to work.

While children and young adults, in general, have a lower risk of serious effects from the coronavirus, that risk still exists, and those effects, while rare, are often life-threatening. In addition, as every week passes, doctors are finding more and more side-effects of the virus.

Also troubling is a series of studies out of China that show that over fifty percent of people infected with the coronavirus – including people who had no apparent symptoms – suffered permanent lung damage. These symptoms are also turning up in significant numbers in the United States.

Back to “normal” fairly soon? Not without more damage to life and health than most people realize.