"Welcome to our automated service system," says a cheerful voice. "This call may be monitored to assure quality control. If you want (blank) press 1, if you want (blank) press 2.

So far, so good. Then the first stumbling block: "Please key in your customer identification number." The number has at least 10 to 12 digits. I squint and begin punching buttons. They don't work the first time ... or the second, or the third ... and each time I have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

Finally I get a human being on the line, but "Sorry, that not my department," and I am referred to another service number and repeat the same time soul-numbing process once more. Finally frustration gets the better of me, and I find myself yelling into a phone at people who aren't even there.

A small glitch in my credit card triggered a problem with my granddaughter's insurance, and it took me more than three hours to straighten out it out.

This is American efficiency at work saving money for some big company at the expense of the costumer's time and sanity. The specific details don't matter, but the issue could have been straightened out in a matter of minutes if I could have spoken to someone either at the bank or at the insurance company without jumping through all those automated hoops.

I'm sure most readers have experienced a similar situation: Time and effort that use to be part of normal service operations have been shifted from the company to the customer. A company automates or outsources its services, but any benefit to the general public is illusionary because the customer has been forced to use his own resources to enrich someone else's pocket.

Efficiency has been served, but the quality of individual life has gone down. Perhaps this is the reason people are so confounded angry these days. We've been duped. A lot of the practices and values we have come to believe implicitly either no longer work or have tuned on us.

Put efficiency at the top of the list. When jobs are automated, when jobs that once were done by an employee are transferred to the customer, people are put out of work. If that employee moves to another better position in the business, it may be a plus, but if he goes on unemployment or worse, has no income at all, the whole economy suffers. This should be pretty obvious.

Less obvious is the matter of growth. How many times have you heard a politician promise to "grow the economy," but growth by itself is not a positive value. Think cancer.

The world economy has been growing for some time now, and it has begun to show its underbelly. Growth has exceeded the world's ability to absorb the excess, and the law of unintended consequence has set in. What once had a positive value has turned negative.

I know I am out of my depth here. The problem is, so are a lot of other people, people far smarter and more empowered than I am. My concern is that in the call to turn the economy around and start another cycle of growth, we will not have solved our basic problems.

Americans are not a patient people, but the answer is not to return to the same practices that got us in trouble in the first place, and this is exactly what will happen if we strive for more efficiency and more growth at the expense of individual.

Joan King lives in Sautee. Her column appears every other Tuesday and on gainesvilletimes.com.