Chicago Boyz

Automated phone systems that provide assistance to customers should at most play quiet, light music or sound a mild tone every ten seconds or so, when they put you on hold. That way you can continue comfortably to do what you were doing, and put the phone on speaker or hold it on your shoulder, until someone picks up the other end of the line. The too-frequent alternative subjects the caller to repeated recorded messages that are useless beyond the initial iteration and needlessly interrupt thereafter. It’s even worse when they vary the recordings, especially to advertise something. Then not only are you forced to wait, you are periodically distracted and must process messages for products and services in which you are not, at the moment, even slightly interested. Who enjoys such an experience? It’s like being transported to the hospital while being subjected to a sales pitch for the ambulance attendant’s auto-repair business.

But the most annoying business voicemail practice is the one where the chirpy recorded voice suggests that if I am really in a hurry I should consult the company’s website. At this point I am ready to yell something rude, both because this kind of announcement is a plainly hostile attempt to make me go away — Our time is more valuable than yours! — and because it ignores the possibility that I am calling precisely because I couldn’t find what I needed on the Web site, which is usually what happened. So they are doubly incompetent. They should be soliciting (and using) my feedback. Instead I get the feeling that I am calling one of those old-fashioned businesses where the phone rings for ten minutes straight while the guy at the counter gabs with the mailman.

The people who design these voicemail systems should consider the possibility that abusing captive callers may antagonize some of them into doing business elsewhere. It certainly has had that effect on me. And the way for a business to deal with this situation is not via the default, Dilbertesque response of making voicemail so burdensome that using the company’s Web site becomes the lesser evil. It is to improve the Web site to the point where customers will want to use it, will enjoy using it. Some companies have caught on, but many continue to act as if they think they’re doing customers a favor by answering the phone. I have a low threshold for avoiding such companies now, and I’ll bet that a lot of other consumers do too.

[I wrote the first draft of this post while on hold.]

Speaking of voting — well, not really, but anyway, via AtlanticBlog, I found this from Will Allen, in a comment over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog: “Politics in a republic with democratic processes is an ugly little business about building a large enough coaltion of factions to force opposing factions to submit to one’s will …”
Reminds me of the greatest political speech ever made:

Can you count, suckers? I say the future is ours if you can count ….
You’re standing right now with 9 delegates from 100 gangs. And there’s a hundred more. That’s 20 thousand hard core members! 40,000 counting affiliates, and 20,000 more not organized, but ready to fight. 60,000 soldiers. Now there ain’t but 20,000 police in the whole town. Can you dig it? Can you dig it? CAAAANNN YOUUUU DIG ITTT! (Roar)
Now here’s the sum total. One gang could run this city. One gang. Nothing would move, without us allowing it to happen. Tax the crime syndicates, the police, because we’ve got the street, suckers! CAAAANNN YOUUUU DIG ITTT! (Roar)

A while back, I wondered: “How long can the equilibrium of technically incompetent rulers lording it over technologically advanced societies be maintained?”
Possibly not much longer at all. Via InstaPundit, we find Robert X. Cringely’s diagnosis of the touchscreen-voting … uh, situation (emphasis added):

In the case of this voting fiasco, there was a wonderful confluence of events.  There was a vague product requirement coming from an agency that doesn’t really understand technology (the U.S. Congress), foisting a system on other government agencies that may not have asked for it.  There was a relatively small time frame for development and a lot of money.  Finally, the government did not allow for even the notion of failure.  By 2004, darn it, we’d all have touch screen voting.
Oh, and there are only three vendors, all of whom have precisely the same motivation (to make as much money as possible) and understanding (that Congress would buy its way out of technical trouble if it had to).  This gave the vendors every reason to put their third string people on the project because doing so would mean more profit, not less.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, somehow expecting a different outcome.  In this instance, the issue isn’t whether Diebold and the other vendors were insane (they aren’t), but whether the government is.

Cringely’s analysis is worth reading in its entirety for its insight into how project management in IT usually works, which is to say, not well.
Returning to the problem at hand, here’s your geeky analogy of the day: if this doesn’t get fixed in the next few months, the effect on American democracy will be analogous to acid rain from a cometary impact turning Earth’s oceans into vitriol — the annihilation of the base of the marine food chain. The reliable exercise of the franchise is the base of the electoral food chain. Cast enough doubt on enough results and the legitimacy of every elected officeholder dissolves like the calcareous shells of so much phytoplankton doused in nitric and sulfuric acid. Publicly-funded bureaucracies suddenly and explicitly become the tools of an arbitrarily-chosen oligarchy, and one that doesn’t even know enough to demand elementary accountability, at that.
Others have suggested that the election of 2004 may be pivotal, as important as, say, 1860 or 1932. Since most such 72-year cycle arguments rely on astrology or numerology, I remain unconvinced. But unless the homeostasis characteristic of American society operates on the voting security issue, universal suffrage could become, at least temporarily, a bad joke in the next eleven months. Not knowing who’d been elected President until December 13th last time around was one thing. What if we didn’t know who’d been elected to anything 5 weeks after the election, and had no good way to find out?

Our troops in Iraq are being afflicted with the Baghdad Boil:

Leishmaniasis, which soldiers have coined the “Baghdad Boil,” is carried by biting sand flies and doesn’t spread from person to person. It causes skin lesions that if untreated may take months, even years, to heal. The lesions can be disfiguring, doctors say. … Sand flies are active during warm weather, and soon after U.S. troops arrived in Iraq in late March, “we started seeing soldiers basically eaten alive,” Coleman says. “They’d get a hundred, in some cases 1,000 bites in a single night.” … Insect repellants and bed nets are standard issue, Coleman says, but many units failed to pack them when they were deployed.

(Via The Command Post).

This story reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago in The Road to Oxiana, that most snide of travel books, by Robert Byron. Byron was an even more eccentric and less PC writer than his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Byron passed through Baghdad in 1933, and wrote this:

The prime fact of Mesopotamian history is that in the thirteenth century Hulagu destroyed the irrigation system; and that from that day to this Mesopotamia has remained a land of mud deprived of mud’s only possible advantage, vegetable fertility. It is a mud plain, so flat that a single heron, reposing one leg beside some rare trickle of water in a ditch, looks as tall as a wireless aerial. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-coloured; they wear mud-coloured clothes, and their national hat is nothing more than a formalised mud pie. Baghdad is the capital one would expect of this divinely favoured land. It lurks in a mud fog; when the temperature drops below 110, the residents complain of the chill and get out their furs. For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal, and leaves a scar.

(Emphasis added.) If Iraq was famous for its boils 70 years ago, why was no adequate provision to have the appropriate medication available to treat our troops, when we were going to station tens of thousands of them there? One of many such questions.

The Bush administration is vulnerable to much, much criticism for the failures of its pre-war planning for the occupation, and the actual handling of the occupation. I have only skimmed this lengthy essay from the New Yorker entitled War After the War in the New Yorker. (Via Arts & Letters.) It is full of specific criticisms of the prewar planning and the actual conduct of the post-war occupation, which seemed to have contained far too much wishful thinking. It is a blue print for the Democrat presidential candidate.

The situation has changed in the last few weeks. It used to be that the “Left” media was criticizing the Bush administration unfairly, and the “Right”, especially the Blogosphere would respond that things were going fine. The media seem to be trying to do their homework and come up with better-founded criticisms. This article even seems to be trying to be fair. Most impressive to me is how it shows our soldiers struggling to do an extremely difficult job. If you’ve got time, read it all. Meanwhile, we need to move from thinking that any criticism of Bush and his team is simply malicious, to trying to understand what is actually happening there. This essay by Anthony Cordesman is a good item to read, as is this worrisome report from the front. (both via Soldiers for the Truth.) We need to be willing to offer constructive criticism and analysis rather than cheerleading or we will be doing “our side” a major disservice.