I am tempted to say that customer service has gone the way of the house call, but that reminds me that even medicine has been outsourced to patients who buy do-it-yourself kits to test and track everything from HIV to blood pressure. The Internet ad for a do-it-yourself eye surgery kit may be, I pray, a hoax. But in an era when every operation short of brain surgery is done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has already been outsourced to family members whose entire medical training consists of TiVo-ing Grey's Anatomy.
The axis of this evil isn't really globalization, it's privatization.
Consider all the major jobs that have now become part of our personal portfolio. We've become our own computer geeks as help lines become self-help lines. We've become our own pension planners and financial analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be health care analysts, determining which star in the galaxy of drug prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our medicine cabinet.
All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposed to, say, free time.
An MIT economist assures me cheerily that many Americans are willing to accept less service for lower cost. In a society built on the value of self-reliance, I am told, we may even feel virtuous when we put together our own bookcase or install our own hard drive.
But I have yet to find an economist who has figured out the human cost of "lower cost" or tallied up the transfer of labor from companies to customers. I've yet to find a consumer who has added, subtracted or multiplied the amount of time we are now spending on the second shift of life management.
Remember back when women were asking "Can We Have It All?" The answer turned out to be that we could have it all only if we could do it all ... and all by ourselves. Now men and women have both won equal opportunity in the do-it-all-by-yourself world. We have officially become our own nonprofit centers.
Welcome to the self-service economy, where we are never without work to be done. Let's celebrate by dining out together. Bring your carrot peeler.
Ellen Goodman is a columnist for The Boston Globe. Her column appears regularly in The Sun. Her e-mail is ellengoodman@globe.com.
