BATTLING THE BEHEMOTHS
INTRODUCTION
When historians look back at the twentieth and twenty first centuries, what seminal moments do you think they will record? What would be the things, the events, the thoughts and words that changed the history of our times? What will be the moments that the history writers will look back at and say - from this point on, it was never the same?
Wars will be on the list. No question about that. World war one. World war two. The war on terror. Inventions too. Great discoveries. The theory of evolution. E=MC squared. Radio. Television. Personal computers. Cell phones. Space travel.
Sweeping social and political changes will be on the list. The 1918 flu epidemic. The great depression. The Holocaust. The Russian revolution. The cold war. The end of the cold war. The spread of democracy. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
And people of course, Churchill.. Roosevelt... Stalin.. .Hitler... Einstein...Jonas Salk.... John F Kennedy.. Martin Luther King...Osama Bin Laden....And words that inspired and moved us and changed the way we looked at life... Blood Sweat and Tears... A date that will live in Infamy...I have a Dream........... and....."please listen carefully because our menu has changed?"
Oops!! Now how did that get in there? Well, it got there because in its way, it truly belongs. Anyone who has had to deal with a major corporation or organization during the past two or three decades knows the phrase. It may not be poetic or of any great literary merit, but in its own way it may be as significant to our every day life as anything ever said by Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt or Rudy Giuliani. I visualize it as the motto emblazoned across the guardian gates of the age of the mega merger and the disappearing humanoids. They are the words that speak of size and remoteness and layers upon layers of impersonal bureaucracy.
Do you remember the good old days? Well, maybe that's not a fair question. The good old days aren't the same for a 75 year old as they are for a teenager. But for most of us who are past the age of 40 or maybe 50, we remember when there was one telephone company that served us all. It was Ma Bell. When we needed something installed or fixed, a Ma Bell technician would come to the house and install it or fix it and there wasn't any charge. We remember a time when Time Magazine was Time Magazine and Warner Brothers was a company that made movies and AOL was just three letters of the alphabet.
There used to be corner grocery stores and general stores and you could go in and talk to the owner about any problems and if you were a little short, maybe he'd put your groceries on the cuff for a few weeks. The local drug store was a place where you stop for a soda and some conversation while you waited for your prescription to be filled. Now we have Walmart and Walgreen's and where are the owners of those companies and how can we talk to them? Not in any easy fashion, that's for sure.
Much of the time, we don't even know who owns who or what. In the last third of the twentieth century there were eruptions of merger mania taking place, it seemed like every other week. Companies were gobbling up other companies like hoards of voracious seventeen year locusts that had emerged a year late and couldn't get enough to satisfy their appetites. Big companies swallowed the small. Sometimes, small companies found ways to swallow up much bigger ones. And the layers that separated them from those of us who used their products or services got thicker and thicker.
The same can be said of the bureaucracies that rule our lives. President after president vow to reduce and streamline the size of government, particularly Republican presidents who sometimes give the impression that they really believe that the country can function very well with virtually no government and no taxes. But the size of the Federal bureaucracy moves only in one direction - up. People who have to deal with Immigration and Naturalization Service often feel that they are being given no more consideration than cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse. Just about every year, there are proposals to simplify the tax codes and just about every year there are changes in our tax forms - but no simplification. And the tax code remains close to 10,000 pages long with five and three quarter million words. Compare that to something like the 1,444 pages and 660,000 words of War and Peace and you begin to get the sense of what Behemoth really means.
Even government at the local level has become more and more remote from the taxpayer that supports it. If you don't think so, take a look at your next property tax bill and count the number of taxing bodies. Or, if you live in an urban area, look in your telephone book under government and see the layer upon layer of governmental bodies.. counties, townships, villages and "districts" - one after the other. It boggles the mind.
Well, you might say, obviously we must need all of these government bodies.. and after all, things seem to be going smoothly and services we need seem to be provided. And as for big companies, isn't that the way of progress and isn't it more efficient and so on and so on.? Well maybe, but more often than not, the bigger and more complicated the organization or company, the more difficult it is for the individual taxpayer or consumer to deal with them - and particularly so if you have a problem or a complaint. I'm not saying that problems or complaints can't be resolved swiftly and efficiently to everyone's satisfaction, but far too often, the clash between the individual and the Behemoth results in something quite different. Even a simple question can sometimes start you down the path into a labyrinth of bureaucratic double speak that can leave you wondering how anything ever gets done in this or any other country.
I decided to write this book (or perhaps a better word is compile it because it includes the experiences of a lot of people in addition to my own), for three reasons. First to show how any individual with access to writing materials - and nowadays that includes e-mail - can do battle, often successfully, with the biggest bureaucracies in the world. Secondly, to expose the unbelievable inefficiency and downright stupidity that you can find residing at all levels of these bureaucracies. And third and most importantly, to show you how you can make a game out of your Battles With Behemoths and in most cases, have fun while you do battle. The experiences described and documented in these pages are all those of battles between individuals and various kinds of Behemoths. They range in time from the early nineteen seventies to the early two thousands . Some concern very serious matters. Others are of a frivolous nature. Some are humorous. Some are tragic. All have beginnings. Not all have endings. You'll read of problems that were resolved and some that were never resolved. You'll see that you can indeed "fight city hall" if you're determined enough, but you can't always win.
You will wonder how on earth some of the companies or government offices are able to function at all with the kind of thickheadedness that their employees demonstrate in these stories. You'll shake your head in disbelief at the incredible inefficiency of some of the world's largest corporations. If you've ever read the comic strip Mr. Boffo, you're familiar with it's recurring "Unclear On The Concept" feature, and you'll recognize it here. You'll wonder how some of the Davids battling the evil Goliaths retained their sanity. Well, maybe not all of them did..... You be the judge.
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