If there's a new way / I'll be the first in line / it better work this time. -- Megadeth, "Peace Sells"

As well as providing income, the call center provides a great roost from which to conduct my socioeconomic studies. For every 4,002 boring, dimwitted, irate customers I encounter there will be one or two who are genuinely interesting to chat with.

Friday I had two of those in a single day. The first young man worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland (he confessed he didn't know what they were trying to prove at the proving ground, and agreed they should be more secure with themselves). One thing he did let fly, though, was that he thought, "We're way too deep in Iraq."

He made that comment out of nowhere and opened the door to a good 25 minute conversation whereas his actual phone issue only took about six. I told him we weren't supposed to discuss politics on the phone but, what the heck, I was on the same page with him! Why was the rest of the country so slow to see it? And what was up with the economy, anyways?

This guy was a chemical engineer and said he agreed the economic picture he was seeing did not square with the rally he was hearing about on the evening news. He said a chemical engineer had their pick of jobs in the `90's but, "I graduated in 2001 so I missed that boom. It was really hard to find this job...It seems like since 2001 everything has been 'blah.'" He said electrical and mechanical engineers had it even rougher, though, which surprised me. He said that as our manufacturing jobs go to India and China, so do the engineering jobs in those fields.

A couple of hours later a black lady in Anderson, Indiana called in and said she wanted to know what she had to do to get her phone cut back on. I told her it was still on, sounded like it had lost contact with the tower, just turn it off and on and it would work again. "Oh, I done lost a $30-an-hour job at General Motors so you can never know what's happening!," she said. I was intrigued and chatted with her about her unemployment status for awhile.

The GM plant in Anderson is closing down and people hired from circa 2000 forward are the first to go. She said that now people who had been hired at the plant in 1977 are being put back on the line after about a 20 year absence. "They were quality control and would ride around on little scooters dressed like they were going to church because they weren't getting dirty," she said. In the meantime hundreds of line people who made $60,000 a year are out, as well as their $75,000 supervisors.

She said that a lot of these people only have high school diplomas and she noted some of them would unwisely fly to Las Vegas every other weekend, eat out every night of the week or waste money in some similar fashion. Now houses are up for sale all over town.

Now, of course you'll say, "It's unrealistic for people with high school degrees to make $60,000 a year on assembly lines." Maybe so, but it went on for at least 30 years. And now it breeds the new situation she talked about. She said now that these people are used to a $60,000-$75,000 lifestyle they're intent in maintaining it no matter what they have to do. So now you have "newbies" entering the drug sales business and getting pumped full of lead when they unwittingly wander into the territory of the old hands. The crime rate has "skyrocketed," she said.

Granted, if a guy thinks the next best thing to his $60,000 job is selling crack, was he ever really a $60,000 man to begin with? Regardless, the after affects are upon us. Along with those people not being able to afford their houses, turning to drug sales, what will be the impact on the casinos where they threw their money away, or the restaurants that served them? I think a guy who posts on the ClassicVanHalen.com forum (a eight-year Marine veteran and college graduate with honors) may have seen the future:

I think things will only get worse. More people falling into poverty and feeling hopeless. More people resorting to crime. More police and spy cameras to deal with the violence. Civil liberties stripped bit by bit in exchange for a punitive security culture. Implanted chips to monitor your habits and movements. They are already installing manditory black boxes in the newer automobiles.

If the old way is no longer economically feasible, well, que sara sara. However, it can't be discarded without a new way. The tens of thousands due to be downsized from America's auto makers have to have somewhere to go and something to do -- besides robbing liquor stores, unless we want to see the preceding paragraph become a reality.

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But it's never all glum here at Art's Bar & Grill! After returning the keyboard that was incompatible with my computer I found the older model (above) on E-Bay and grabbed it for a mere $87. It just arrived today and is in absolute mint condition, and the previous owner even had the original box and threw in a nice tote bag. I haven't hooked it up yet, but am very eager.

On a Metallica chat board there was a musical posting by some Australian youngster where he sang, and I thought he sounded pretty good. He demonstrated falsetto singing and full-throated singing and could hit the same notes both ways. I thought about sending him a MP3 of one of my bare tunes and seeing what he could add, but I'm shy to do it.

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CD's bought recently: the Who Quadrophenia (completes my Who collection!), ZZ Top Rancho Texicano (Greatest Hits).

1 Comments:

 Anonymous said...

From that picture of you at work with your headset on, you look like a conservative, I bet your luck has started improving too.

9:07 AM, January 08, 2007  

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