Living the corporate dream
‘Just what have we done to ourselves?’, asks S Buckingham
(The News), and yes, a very good question.
Alleged shortages of food, building materials and lorry drivers, much of it blamed on our leaving the EU and so much more on the pandemic.
What has become clear however is that both Brexit and Covid are being used as an excuse to change the way we live and work, and not for the better.
Yes, many of the supposed shortages can possibly be traced to production issues; driver shortages were a disaster waiting to happen for quite a few years now, exacerbated by the return home of foreign nationals.
But frighteningly what it has shown up is our dependency on supplies from outside these shores, our inability to compensate by going without stuff that is not life sustaining. At the same time, we have been tested and pushed into having to accept lesser standards of ‘service’.
For example, and not in any order, how often do you hear ‘sorry, due to higher than expected call numbers – blah blah blah’. When I hear that I am 25th in the queue just to speak to a doctor’s receptionist 47 minutes later, I ask myself why don’t they employ more people? It’s all to do with Covid!
We don’t have to queue outside the bank any more and, if it hasn’t been closed down, people at the door direct you to a machine as more humans in the banking sector are phased out.
Ditto the effectiveness of the ‘smart meter’, remote readings computed into bills before money is taken by direct debit, little if any human intervention. And when it goes wrong ‘due to higher than expected calls...’
Log on and get the supermarket app where you can go around and do your shopping, scanning each purchase as you pop it in the basket. Before you leave the building, the money is taken electronically from your bank, and in the future a robot will trot along behind topping up the shelves. No more planned human working, and cash not accepted.
How many more self-service tills in your local supermarket now?
This is what we have done, deceived ourselves, seemingly accepted that we don’t have to do productive work, more or less forced to accept everything we need is at the click of a mouse or scan of an app. The biggest growth sector in the country is the debt industry, the millstone for many known as a mortgage, or multiple credit cards to keep up on ever changing trends.
Can someone please tell me what my future great grandchildren will do to earn money if we don’t go back to working on the land or in the factories to support ourselves? Selling buckets of purified fresh air online or ‘influencing’ someone about which seaweed to eat is a damn poor outlook.
B Nevill
Gosport