Day #17 - Quality & the Quality of Life

Hey kids, it's that time again....another 2 parter.  Couldn't just hold that sucka down to one subject, you know me.

Today we're gonna get a load of Quality and the Quality of our lives.  They seem to, of course, go hand in hand...so it only makes good sense to do them together.  Let's munch through those bones, all right?

When I refer to quality, it should be evident of which I speak.  I'm talking, of course, about the quality in what we make, what we export, and what we import.  Our quality of food; products - organic and not so much, and what we build and construct.  These things speak volumes of us and of our time/generation.

I cover this a lot.  I have another blog entitled "The American Consumer" on this site, and although I haven't had the time really to add to it, there's something there now that talks about an intangible area of the all-encompassing area of quality...service.

The saddest thing concerning our country today is that we are failing.  Not in just tangible products, but in intangible as well.  Cars used to last forever, and if they didn't, we knew what to do to fix them.  Now we aren't even allowed under the hood, except to top up the fluids.  Anything else we touch voids any skeleton of a warranty that might have been in place.  Computers used to be up-gradable by the common consumer...today, if you go out and buy a larger hard drive, you can't even put it into a laptop, mostly due to the manufacturer, and Bill Gates.  Bill has made it so you can't purchase a copy of Windows without paying almost $500...and if you change the hard drive, the manufacturer says that you aren't able to load just any old operating system on them, because of compatibility issues.  What changed?  Didn't used to be that way.  Greed, my friends, that's what happened.  HP used to be my favorite laptop, but now they've put something called Smart Protect on it, making it impossible to install any drivers on your new and bigger hard drive.  You have to purchase a loaded hard drive from THEM instead, to upgrade it, at twice to three times the cost of the blank hard drives you can buy in the store.  If laptops weren't so dirt-cheap, I would have gotten rid of mine forever a long time ago.

And, thanks to our demands for things that cost less, it's widely excepted that everything will go out in a little over a year.  Parts are produced at less cost at the expense of their durability...and we're OK with that.  Me?  I'd personally like to pay more and have them last a hell of a lot longer.  These days I find myself more and more cussing and cursing every little thing that falls apart in my hands, because now I have to replace it...AGAIN...and I just bought it last month.

Worse yet, sometimes products are falling apart within minutes of my taking them out of the box.  Anything I used to buy, back in the 70's and 80's (even these weren't exactly what I would call our finest product decades) I was sure would last at the minimum of 6 months.  Now I can't guarantee things will last more than a day or two.  The return times for these products...even the expensive ones, like TV's and computers, is now 14 days...when it used be as much as 90.  This says loads for what our manufacturers expect from us in relation to the products we buy.  What they say nowadays, precisely, is buyer beware.  Good luck with that. "Sorry to empty your wallets, but tough T-cups pal."

Moving along to what I consider to be our LOWEST score in the world, is our current method of service, whether face to face or over the phone.  Our larger corporations blow us off and let us fly off, knowing full well that, if they lose us?  More will come.  "Screw you!  Just as you and I were talking we had 200 more sign up!'  What they don't think through on though, is that we sign up with them because of their established good name, the knowledge of their *former* exceptional customer service, and their durability in our economy.  Oh you bet we sign up in droves!  But once we figure out how gone to hell your service has gotten, well, we'll leave in those same droves.  It's all about the money.  Once they have you?  Service is out the window.  Customer service reps are no longer polite, empathetic or sympathetic to your plight, they're just there as a token, because it's expected.  If you're brave enough to endure the tiresome selection making of choices in the automated systems, taking on the attitudes of the reps is your next hurdle...and probably your last with that company.  And if the customer service is handled overseas?  You can expect even less pleasantry; and these particular reps are trained to make sure you accomplish very little by calling.  What are you going to do anyway, fly to India to confront your indifferent rep?  Not likely.

Which, of course brings us to our quality of life.  What were those things again?  You remember...OH YEAH...Life.  Liberty.  The Pursuit of Happiness...Yeah, I remember hearing about that once.  Never seen one..but I might recognize one if I ever did.

Life is always iffy anyway, and with cops shooting unarmed people on a daily basis, more and more, and thanks to us having to have our big American noses in the middle of everybody's wars, my life doesn't appear to have the value it once did.

And liberty?  Our most precious possession?  The more socialist this country becomes, I doubt that to stand much longer as an inalienable right.

And finally, there's the pursuit of Happiness.  Let's do a short test of that.  For one, I know I'm never all that happy with things that break on a regular basis.  2.  I know happiness to be in short supply after I spend $31,000 on the average new car and it ends up on the side of the road just as the speedometer hits 100,002.3.  I'm know I'm pretty much devoid of all happiness when my computer ends up crashed and incapacitated on day 366.  Seems to me I need to find somewhere else to pursue my happiness, or maybe I'm not pursuing it as far as where they've moved the finish line to.

Thank GOD, THIS day's over...Tomorrow promised great things.  Stay tuned.