I REMEMBER reading many years ago about a man who was relentlessly sent bill after bill by a company telling him he owed them $0.00. Yes, that is right, zero point zero dollars. And no matter what he did to try to get it to stop, the same bill kept coming month after month, and with it the inevitable threat of being taken to court for non-payment.
This apocryphal story served to raise our fears of computers taking over the world and turning us into mere cogs in a giant wheel, in which logic would reign at the expense of simple common sense.
And, of course, all that has indeed come to pass.
In my case, I can prove it. You see, dear friends, I have been receiving a statement from Multi-Choice Television letting me know that I have a balance of $4.34.
A credit balance. Which means, if I studied my accounts right, that I have overpaid them by said amount, so they owe me the money, not the other way around.
I had closed my MCTV subscription earlier this year, so, when I received the statement for the first time I called to let the corporation know. I wanted to suggest to them that, since they wouldn’t be billing me anymore, they could clear off the balance by sending me a check. A novel idea, no doubt.
Recorded message
I can’t remember if I ever got through, but I don’t think I did; all I do remember was hearing over and over again how important my call was to them and to please stay on the line.
But I do remember also emailing them to let them know the balance existed. This was done following my theory, based on the above anecdote, that corporations do not know what their computers are doing in terms of billing their customers. I thought I would be thanked mightily and asked to drop by at my earliest convenience to pick up the check for $4.34. I figured I could put a “John Redman Bovell” with it and buy a latté.
There was no answer to my email, not even a computer-generated reply, the cyberspace equivalent of “Your call is important to us . . . ” (so important that a computer voice has to let us know that no humans are interested in talking to us).
Now, ordinarily, dear reader, I would not bring this up, but as a taxpayer I feel I must. Why? Because I have now received six or seven of these monthly statements, all saying the same thing: “Hey, Mr H., we owe you $4.34.”
Here’s my question: How much has CBC spent over the past six months (remember, the corporation does not make a net profit, or so we have been told) to generate this statement every month?
By the time you add up the cost of using the computer, the cost of generating the statement, the stuffing of it (by human or machine) into an envelope (more cost) and sorting, handling and paying the franking amount, it must be over a dollar.
Let’s say it is a dollar and I have received at least six so far: That means CBC is now in deficit by $6.00, which is more than they said they owed me in the first place. Even if the cost of writing a check is 75 cents, they would have been better off cutting me that check. Now they are down at least six dollars and still owe me $4.34.
And I am still waiting on my mug of coffee.
Of course, all this leads me to suspect that no actual human beings actually work in the CBC accounts department any more, but that it has been put on autopilot, repeating over and over again the policies and activities which were programmed into it sometime in the recent past.
Sort of like its news and public affairs department.
Noteworthy: Close encounter of the embarrassing kind
For some reason, the garbage collection point for my house is alongside one of the busiest highways in Barbados.
It therefore has become something of the norm for at least a dozen vehicles to go by as I am trying to put out all of the trash bags our household seems to generate every few days.
The fact that the Sanitation Services Authority does not send its “collection agents” as often as I might like means that the people in those vehicles might observe my efforts from time to time to negotiate with the garbage bags already present in the bins to move over and make room for their late-arriving cousins.
The whole process is not helped by the fact that I am not usually dressed in business attire when undertaking this chore.
So I suppose it was, by the law of averages, bound to happen. But you can no doubt imagine how I felt the other morning when I raised my head momentarily from the work of trying to get more bags into an already crowded bin to see directly in front of me, and, of course, slowed to almost a crawl by the traffic on the road, none other than MP2.
Had I been consulted, I would have requested a more formal setting, perhaps a Press conference at which I was bedecked in tie and jacket, iPad in hand, for my first formal encounter with our new Prime Minister.
As it turned out, I was standing in yard clothes, garbage bags in hand.
Of course, I was not able to see inside the tinted windows of MP2, so I am not sure if that first encounter has indeed taken place in a de facto way.
There was a police siren wailing just ahead, so I was also unable to hear if loud laughter was emanating from the vehicle.
Patrick Hoyos is a long-standing journalist and publisher of the Broad Street Journal.