I think everyone should have an "If I were King" section to their web page, diary, or whatever. So it begins now for me.

One of the most frustrating things in the world is when a company makes some kind of error, and you have to take valuable time out of your day to fix it. Common examples of this are phone and electric company glitches. I had it happen to me this past weekend while visiting my Dad at the beach for Father's day. I went to use my calling card, and it was rejected. Why? Because my local phone company somehow changed my long distance carrier, I think. I don't have exact word yet because I haven't heard back from the people who were supposed to get in touch with me. All in all, I've wasted about an hour on this. It is in NO WAY MY FAULT. So why should they get off free? Even more importantly, why should I have to pay (with my time) for their error?!?!

If I were King ... I would pass legislation entitled, "The Idiot Compensation Law." Where penalties would be applied, and compensation awarded, in situations where Party A makes some kind of error that would have otherwise gone unnoticed unless Party B took some initiative to fix it.

We'd need to set some timeframes on "would have otherwise gone unnoticed" and a dollar amount / hour needs to be figured out. But I think this is well within the scope of our legal system. Simply take a person's filed income (from their income tax statement) and calculate an hourly wage based on a 40 hour workweek. "Would have otherwise gone unnoticed" should probably get defined as the length of two billing cycles. In cases where there is no notion of a billing cycle, it should probably be modified to deal with how willing the violator is to "make good" on the error beyond the normal compensation (eg., fixing the problem).

At the very least, such legislation would get the discussion going and save many hours of wasted time. It would also keep businesses on their toes. I mean, the time really has to come. If we don't somehow start dealing with real issues of fairness and equality in this country (world) things are going to continue to spiral out of control ... until it's too late. Yes, there are other issues too, so stay tuned.

That's it for now. There's lots of other stuff, but I only have so much time for my lunch break here.