The wife is the chief administrator for her office. Has been forever or at least since the day when someone first decided how to spell the words "business office". In the course of that time she has had to plan and organize relocations for the office and staff with the frequency only experienced by most army brats and their families, far more often than most families would consider uprooting themselves and taking up residence in another burrow, at any rate. A living testament to the illusion of the stability of business. Generally, she (the wife) shops around for the best price in office movers. You know those people who make their lively-hood moving desks and chairs and all the warmth and comforts of cubicles from one floor of a building to another or from one building to another. Office movers are not to be mistaken for office "movers and shakers" per se, because well, the former are as a rule a lot more industrious and productive than the latter. Perhaps it has something to do with not resting on the perks of a college degree which teaches little more than the theory of working for a living…but some (especially people with a degree) would disagree with this assessment, to be sure.
At any rate, recently, having decided to contract the services of a group of movers who had done an exemplary job for her in the past and at a fair price, the wife was informed that as corporate need would have it, she would have to solicit an agency bound by national corporate contract to secure and arrange the logistics of getting all the stuff from point A to point B.
As it turns out, said agency charged a much prettier penny than the originally found local moving company, but the best part was this…the agency proposed a price and informed the wife and her management that the company who would contact them for planning was, none other than the very company she had negotiated and come to terms with in the first place! Of course, being brokered by the agency, there were greater estimations of how many hours it would take, less flexibility in scheduling and the promise of a week worth of down time for the office in question…but hey for a few grand above and beyond the originally proposed deal negotiated between the Wife and the moving company, you can't expect everything, can you?
And here's the point of all this blather on my part…it would appear that all to often in the 21st century the gross national product has become the creation, not of product, not of service and not anything as lofty as even intellectual property. The business of American business is primarily the creation of more business! This agency for example is in the business of tacking on a large sum of money to the cost of a service performed by someone else like some Hollywood agent who reaps the benefits of profit for simply making a phone call, outsourcing a project from A to Z without so much as a detail of involvement and then have someone contact the Wife so that negotiations could then finally begin between the parties involved at that point in time. A middle man industry.
Case #2. Our family dentist was a good guy. We saw him for years, without so much as the need for treatment beyond the typical cleaning and entrenching every six months. I say "was" because unfortunately, on the way to the office one morning one of the big laws, the law of inertia over-rulled our dentist's plans for that day and he was stopped by an immovable object in the shape of another automobile which put a kink in the rest of his day, as well as for any and all so much as remotely involved and created quite a bit more inconvenience and heart ache to boot for his survivors. Yes, Virginia, it’s true. It seems "only the good (do) die young".
Fast forward about a year and now his practice is under new professional management and staff. In a half dozen visits since it's opening and close to a dozen visits since that time by me and the fam', we've compiled a large sum in payments for services, never really mentioned by our dearly departed dentist. The implications would be that the whole Fox family should be toothless hags based on the past prognosis' of our previous dental professional and drinking our meals through a straw. Suddenly, we are in need of root scalings, floride treatments and even fillings for potential, yet to develop cavities and all with insurance coverage estimates that have the accuracy of a long range weather forcast!
(
"Uh, did you want that in silver or the much more expensive matching white porcelin which is so-o much more attractive?"
"Who cares? This thing is so far back in my head, it would take a thousand years and an anthropologist studying ancient dentistry to dig up my remains to ever see the damned thing! Pack a piece of tin foil in there for all I give a hoot!")Coincidence? I don't think so.
And don't get me wrong. These new guys are good folks too. With their hearts in the right place, I'm sure. But even in this instance…it's pretty obvious that we're dealing with a business whose primary concern is the business of creating more business. And maybe with a keenly sharp focus on keeping the electric billed paid for the office.
Case #3. I've been a geek and actively employed in the Information services since 1985. The drill used to go like this …You see an ad for a job, apply for it, perhaps get the interview, nail it and get the job. Or not, of course, but the onus and the job was a result of a direct feed between a technical person and a business or a company that needed to hire one and have them on staff for specific technical reasons. Now however, in the 21st century, 85% of all hiring for network administration and help desk support (if not outsourced overseas) is done through the use of technical service agencies. You never get to make personal contact with the employer on your own merit or identity. Instead you simply "represent" an agency, who will send you out on interviews, set your salary before hand, collect almost as much per hour for your actual labor should you get the position and will even negotiate with the potential employer the length of your employment before you even have the opportunity to accept it. Sometimes, two to six months later, the contract between the employer and the agency (having met it's expiration date) puts you back into the interviewing mode with a new potential employer for whom you can again represent not yourself, but the agency and get this,…if the previous employer wanted to, they can not, without either paying off the agency some kind of signing fee or facing breech of contract hire the said, God-actual technical person as a company employee, if they thought that person could walk on water.
Again, the business of creating business over rides any actual production or provision of services in the name of, what? Perhaps adding some unnecessary administration? What do these agencies do, actually? Nothing but act as a middle-person, make sometimes more or as much as the schlub who actually checks in and performs a task for the employer on a daily basis and no one seems to question the validity of this spirit-like and costly connection between the employer, laborer and the superficial yet etheral entity known as "the agency".
In this and many other instances which are expanding daily, folks, we have created a national product based on the creation of nothing more than making more business.
Some friends of mine from way back, were (and still are) some very fine musicians and song writers. They once penned and performed a tune called "Gypsy's Biz". The "biz" part was a reference to shit, or more specifically perhaps, the bullshit or scams put about by this roving demographic in the course of their trying to get by and get over.
This whole business of creating business that serves no purpose but to create more business reminds me of this song every damned time I see yet another example of it.
Some will say it's simply good and good for business. I see it as nothing more than "biz"!
