Dialogue: Queue forms here to join our uncaring age of inadequacy

The failure of services to match demand makes a mockery of politicians' and marketers' promises, says DON DONOVAN*.

Perhaps when the lapse of time allows historians to label our epoch, it will be known as The Age of Inadequacy. For the inability of services to match demand was never more apparent in modern peacetime history than it is today.

Inadequacies are manifest in hundreds of daily transactions, large and small, frivolous and serious.

They are thrown into high visibility because they are contrasted against what we have come to expect, and also because they are denials of the loudly trumpeted promises of politicians and marketers.

Failure to perform leads to a resigned and wry cynicism.

Our response to the recorded telephone message that tells us all operators are busy but assures us we are much-valued customers in a serenaded queue makes us shrug wearily as we conjure up images of a solitary operator, feet up on the bench, cup of coffee in hand, gleefully watching a row of lights, each one signifying a despised customer.

When they first "downsized" all the switchboard operators and started this silly, remote, impersonal business, we were intrigued. Then we became angry. Now we are conditioned to take it or leave it, knowing that if we leave it, we shall only have to go through the whole business again.

The queue, always a sign of inadequacy, might also perversely be a measure of a service company's efficiency. To management it could be seen as a good sign if there's a queue because it implies demand.

And while in a competitive business the disappearance of a queue might mean that customers have gone elsewhere, in any service that has some measure of monopoly the organisation can merely sack a few workers until the queue reappears.

This has recently happened in my local PostShop, a place where I used to go happily for the friendly faces behind the counter, the willingness to serve and the absence of queueing customers except on the rarest of occasions.

It was a complete about-face from the old, sour Post Office, a new spirit that emerged when it was discovered that putting the needs of the customer first led to greater opportunities to sell a larger range of products.

My PostShop went from being a 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday to an open-seven-days service. Alas, it didn't last. The hours are shortening and the queues are evident.

The wait is as long to buy a 45c stamp as to register a motor vehicle. There are fewer staff; they're still friendly and helpful but they're disenchanted, having seen their colleagues leave, one to work in a bank, another in an insurance office, others who knows where?

It's only a matter of time ...

And as the queues grow there's the prospect of Jim Anderton's baby coming to the PostShop like a cuckoo in a too-small nest.

That'll make queues to delight the management - such demand. But unlike the PostShop, the bank will fight in a shark-filled pool of alternatives.

Not that banks are without their inadequacies. I was in the Orewa branch of the least popular of banks (according to recent polls) where one teller attended to a queue of eight people while in full view behind the counter six other staff sat down-eyed at desks and computer consoles.

Who knows how many more staff were hidden behind screens? Despite their advertised assurances, banks hate real live non-electronic customers.

Inadequacy will mean elderly people left more readily to die. In the absence of a willingness to grasp the nettle of the problem of an ageing population, euthanasia will feature ever more prominently as a solution.

Just a few weeks ago, a 71-year-old friend of mine died in Christchurch directly as a result of inadequate treatment. He was kept waiting for an ambulance; he was sent home too soon after a heart attack; he became ill again and had to be returned to the hospital, where he lay unattended in a corridor for more than three hours before dying later of a pneumonic condition that could have been treated simply and easily had the resources been adequate.

Meanwhile, inadequacy in spades shows itself in all aspects of the bureaucratic edifice. Lack of money means the police are incapable of coping with much other than the major crimes; lack of money also means our defence forces make us a laughing stock.

A floundering lack of community will or authority allows our children to vandalise our property, beat up our streets in illegal vehicles, get drugs easily, play truant, sell their immature bodies and openly defy their parents and teachers.

When history judges our age, it will be seen that its failure to achieve the promises of its politicians and marketers came not so much from a shortage of resources as from their misapplication and a neglect of society to care for its charges.

It will be seen that selfishness characterised our inadequacies. That we lived in a time when at family level the unacknowledged child abuses (in far greater numbers than the high-profile beatings) were those of poor preparation for their lives ahead, of feeding them on junk food and trash television, of denying them standards.

And at state level our elected and unelected representatives indulged themselves in petty, party political points-scoring.

They allowed the export of the pride of its intellectual crop while it gradually sank to become a nation of little account.

* Don Donovan is an Auckland writer.