I just spent an agonizing hour on the phone with Verizon Wireless, which, at the end of the call, thanked me for being "a loyal Verizon Wireless customer." The purpose of my call? To cancel — by paying an early termination charge — the very last, excruciatingly costly and painful vestige of Verizon's services. The irreconcilability of its saccharine thanks and my fragrantly disloyal cancellation was only the final example of two ghastly years of Verizon's corporate incomprehensibility, which began, I should note, with Verizon's two-year inability to even recognize the cell number — its assigned number — of my daughter's phone.
The next time some right-wing free-market apologist croons to me about the delightful efficiencies of corporate America and the gross inefficiencies and detestability of big guvment, I shall reflect on, and promptly vomit, my recent experience with Verizon. And Mediacom (which took at least eight months to identify and fix a faulty cable line that regularly cut into my cable service, for which I was often expected to pay full boat). And assorted other corporate run-ins and sloppy services and deficient products and inexcusable fuckups that by now have racked up into the countlessly unmemorable.
We are often assured by many of these distinguished apologists that nothing beats the glories of private enterprise. It's of no little coincidence that many of them work for, are paid by, and receive the associated benefits of, the detestable federal guvment. They know better, I suspect, and they ain't about to leave a good thing.