The land of the free!! Where nothing is free and the help is thin and transparent as a ghost.
When I use the internet to cry for "help" (which went extinct around the year 1900) I meet resistance from other countries simply because I live in the United States.
Do you think MTV shows you what my life is? The bouncy castles and car commercials and reality shows where people slam food on the floor and make complete slobbering asses of themselves? How we all have a cell phone and dine out every night, and insure our boat/motorhome/ATV all under one cheap and comprehensive plan?
I'll inform everyone of something I figured out ages ago: every place in the world is just the same as the last, give or take some landmarks. And infested with fearless greed.
All the same commercials, all the same prides and promises, and they all water down to one simple thing. Being inhumanely used as a stepping stone to help someone with more greed (or less shame) than you reach their dream. And don't you dare try to move, once someone plants a foot on you! Don't so much as waver or you'll be stomped flat, just one more forgotten and generic tombstone in a sea of the ignored dead.
Today I pick AT&T to point the laser at..
AT&T Advantages! Why buy Online?? All the hottest cells and devices at the lowest prices! Flexible plans that meet your needs! Rebates! Limited time offers! Phones for just 99 cents!!! Cutting edge R&D that leads to the sleekest user-friendly experience in the market!
Oh, but we just don't have the futuristic tech required to create: You have reached your data cap limit. Reply MORE to this text to pay for more data.
Nope. Way too fancy. Basically, when speaking to any big business, imagine just to the side of their desk stands a grisly guillotine, blade nicked and matted with hair and blood from countless unceremonious beheadings. Mentally replace the knick-knacks and figures on their desk with shrunken heads and necklaces made of fingertips and shattered bone, while you're at it.
Even insurance, which is supposed to be our safety net, has no safety nets to speak of. They're ready to watch you plummet and splash into formless jelly any day of the week. And when you finally need your insurance (that you've been paying accident-free month after accident-free month), they fight you like an angered mother bear to avoid holding their end of the bargain.
In school (fifteen years ago) they told me very soon everyone in the world would have a CD player, because technology advances will make them cost less than a dollar to manufacture. All very true, I'm sure, but we'll never see it. Nothing gets sold for less than a 400%-6000% profit. I can barely begin to imagine a world where giant companies were A-OK with simply doubling their money per transaction, instead of quintupling, and then charging late fees/breach-of-contract fees/overdraft fees, and then, as if they haven't done enough already, they pretend our credit score is actually our physical being (and in some ways now, it is) and they beat it like a piñata.
I imagine being the one with the stick, as opposed to being the pathetic gray piñata that I am, must be comfortable (assuming I could still sleep at night, which would be made easier by air conditioning and posturpedic technologies.
I suppose the real problem here is an over-abundance of employees, and lack of employer. If it were the other way around employees would be solicited jobs daily, like colleges fighting over Bill Gate's sperm bank results. Instead, we're less than dogs, ready to be wrung for what we're worth and then offered the "economy model" coffin at the funeral home (its cardboard, for those of you wealthy enough to not even have to consider it as an option, and even then they're ready to charge you forty dollars for ten worth of cardboard).
How we haven't rioted in the streets is beyond me. I suppose those that are happy are blindly happy, and those of us working in the belly of the cruise ship are too frail and beaten to stand up, kick our way up to the party deck and scream, "This whole sick thing would fail and sink without us!".
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