A Lighter View
Outsourcing politicians
By K.E.H. Stagg

July 23, 2009

An email currently making the Internet rounds suggests that the president’s job can best be filled through outsourcing to a tele-techie in India. The joke is elaborate in its details, suggesting that this move would save taxpayers trillions of dollars while not losing any substantive quality through phone tree-type statements prepared for the pseudo-president to reply to when asked about major concerns.

I’m not sure there’s not a kernel of truth hidden in all those yucks in the joke currently circulating by email. Why stop with the presidency? Let’s outsource all politics! Instead of an individual of European descent that I don’t get to meet personally anyhow, I could at least talk to a live person in India, even if neither of us really understands what the other is saying (in that sense, it’s exactly like dealing with a politician!)

Imagine Dillsburg being run from a call center in Asia. Our trash might not be picked up regularly and our mail might get delivered sporadically, but dagnabbit we’d have cheerful, polite people on the other end of the line when we called to complain. And they’d take our calls 24/7, so we’d never have to wait for the office to open, or worry about not getting an answer on a holiday.

Telephone politics offers distinct advantages beyond those of time zones and customer service. Think of the Indian price structure. I, for one, welcome the advantage of reducing my infrastructure tax rates! Mumbai gets more monsoon rains than Dillsburg gets snow, so whatever model they follow for weather emergency services has to be okay for us. Mumbai has a lot more citizens not paying taxes than we do, so there again, their model would work for us, too. And we already know how good their technology is: half the techies in this country are from India; the other half work in India and our calls are simply forwarded to them from Amazon.com, Bank of America, et al.

The downside would be having to depend on the capricious telephone industry to run our political arena. Can you imagine getting a dropped signal in the middle, not of a discussion about whose turn it is to take out the trash, but about having the curbside trash taken away? And the public phoning etiquette that already doesn’t exist would get even worse. It’s bad enough being the unwilling eavesdropper on a conversation about the dog’s toenail fungus, but I shudder to think what unwelcome revelations might be forthcoming if I had to overhear conversations about excessive use of the sewage system, and the like. There are certain subjects about my fellow man I’d just as soon not know, and politics by telephone definitely threatens to cross that line.

Perhaps we’re just not ready yet for tele-politics in Dillsburg. Maybe we need an interim step, such as “virtual” politicians. Nah! We’ve had enough experience with interactive robotics. Bring on the tele-elections!