You Are The 11th Caller In Line

I have about five half-finished written posts for this blog that I've generated over the course of the past two days. It's a lot of stuff I want to talk about and the topics have more open timeframes. But as the slightly hiccuped loop of on-hold music plays in my ear as I wait for a utilities company across the state that I in theory wrapped up my dealings with mid-June, I can't help but wonder about something that I'm sure won't linger beyond this call.

There are a lot of systems in life that don't work. A lot of hoops to jump through, a lot of unnecessary and redundant steps. Some of these systems are devastating to people's lives, and some are only inconvenient. Sometimes systems get updated, a much-needed fix-up to make them operate better or as they should have from the beginning. This is not the case for the utility companies I've interacted with in the past few years. One of them only allow payments for the utilities you need through mail-in check, or cash payments at their offices. Their offices, mind, that are only open during the standard work week, so if you happen to have a standard work week schedule, good luck with that. Or you can pay by phone for the others, but at a price! But that redirects you to another website that also charges you for their service. Oh, but a web account for paperless billing is an option! Except I kept getting paper bills anyway, so what was the point of that?

And I know why they get away with this, too. They could so easily make this process that so many people must go through on a regular basis streamlined just a bit more. It could probably even make the workers on the other end have a better time of it! But they don't have to, because everyone who can afford to acquire these utilities, will go through the obstacle courses set up to get and keep them, because they aren't that big of a deal. So why bother, right? It's only people's time. It's only this terrible loop of music that's probably being played off of an overly-used cassette tape, because that's the sound quality we're working with here.

What drives a process that could use some updates to continue dragging on in an incredibly inefficient manner? Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it? That can't be good enough.

Clarity and simplicity are so rarely found in the world. It's funny to me that it takes some bit of minutia like settling utility bills to remind me of that, and appreciate it where it can be found.