Friends and I are have been having a tough time this summer reconciling the increasing sophistication of our home and office appliances with the level of service that comes with the machines we depend on so heavily. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the two: the more sophisticated the equipment, the more inept the service representative. Another mathematically valid observation we agree on is: the more dependent we are on the appliance, the more moronic the service representative. And then there is the corollary that dictates the more moronic the repairman, the more arrogant and even patronizing he is.

Certainly I’ve experienced this in the office environment, where IT swaggers to the desk to fix the signature-option in Microsoft Outlook, and then, two hours later, has reinstalled the operating system and all the applications in Microsoft Office. Meanwhile, while you are quizzing the techie as to what justified the re-install he launches into a techno-jargon made worse by the Chinese language filter through which the professor is lecturing you on the finer points of your hard disk’s refresh rate. A good friend of mine recently had the misfortune of asking an IT service provider for anti-virus software to be put on his computer, only to be backing up all his data four hours later while the computer was temporarily stable: the repairman had inadvertantly fried the system and didn’t know how long my friend would be able to successfully boot up. My friend is still unsure whether a complete reformatting of his hard disk and reinstallation of the operating system and applications will indeed protect his computer from viruses; after all, the repairman succeeded where the trojans and worms had failed. Perhaps my friend should invest in anti-repairman spyware.

Meanwhile, on the home front, a couple goofs from Panasonic – one very tall and muscular, untalkative; and the other small and squirrelly with a penchant for saying “yingaide!” (“of course!) and “mei wenti!” (“no problem!”) – wasted an hour of my time as the small one held the rope that supported the big one as the big one scrambled over the wall of the balcony to poke at the air conditioner unit. When I’d gone to the fridge (which was still working) to fetch a beer for myself the two quickly packed up and were out the front door, the little guy calling back to me “mei wenti!”. I went to the elevator before the doors sealed their escape and told them both to come back to the apartment to prove to me the central unit worked. I turned on the home office air conditioner to 16 degrees Celcius; turned on the central air con in the living room to the same temperature. After all, they had at least proven they could defy gravity (or that the little guy was indeed pretty strong, though that had yet to be truly put to the test with the big guy’s actually plummeting to the ground twelve floors below). I told them the home office temperature was the baseline, and, as such, what was blowing out of the livingroom unit was at best room temperature. “Mei wenti!” shorty piped up, “It’s a new unit; it just needs a little time to come up to temperature.” “How long?” I queried. A shrug, a blank look. I told them to get out.

Two days later an HVAC technician with very stinky feet managed to gouge the stained and polished planks of the flooring with the panel that slipped out of his hands as he was removing it from the ceiling. That was just after he nearly put his oily, blackened hands all over the cream upholstery of a dining room chair (the yelp was enough to startle him into realizing we may not be agreeable with his cavalier approach to clean furniture), and he left footprints from the patio back to the livingroom and back again several times. In the end, he said sagely, “They gave you a bum unit, and the decorators did the wiring all wrong.” Of course, as a central unit, that means in China tearing out the ceiling and replacing everything. I wasn’t impressed. And he still had stinky feet.

As China works to establish a service industry and eventually a services outsourcing sector that is supposed to cater to the world, the companies that place their products in our homes and offices have an uphill battle in turning round centuries of “I don’t cared-ness” and “It’s not my problem (even though I’m still supposed to be paid for my trouble)”. Eventually, manufacturers here will have to learn it’s much easier to make a chair than to stand behind it with pride if they want to become outstanding companies in China – and in the world.