The All-American Excuse: ‘Sorry, the System Is Down’

WASHINGTON —  The hotel receptionist, all smiles, spoke with practiced ease. “Sorry, the system is down so we cannot give you a bill. It will be mailed to you within two days.”

Five weeks and seven telephone calls later, there was still no bill. Telephone call No. 8 established there would never be one.

“Sorry, when the system was down, its memory was damaged. Your payment has been received, thank you, but we have no record of your stay,” the caller was told.

“Sorry, the system is down” is a familiar refrain in the United States, a country with an enduring image as a paradise of efficiency.

The phrase serves as an explanation for a long list of problems, from airline, hotel or car reservations that vanish without a trace to deliveries made weeks late.

“Sorry, the system is down” covers many of the everyday frustrations of life in a society dependent on computers and machines but it fails to explain a wide gap between image and reality in the United States.

That gap is particularly apparent to foreigners and Americans returning home after long absences abroad, where they tended to remember efficient plumbing, telephones that work, workmen who keep appointments and planes that fly on time.

“What happened, America?” former CBS correspondent Larry Pintak asked in a New York Times commentary on returning home after 10 years abroad. “You used to work so well.” Now, Pintak observed, “everybody seems out to lunch.”

Exaggerated expectations are prime reasons for such disgruntled comments. Overall, the United States probably works as well or better than most countries but few others, with the possible exception of Switzerland or West Germany, have such a high international reputation for efficiency.

In chaotic Cairo, for example, one does not expect prompt mail delivery. In New York, the newcomer does and is surprised that a letter can take a week to travel a distance of 18 city blocks.

In the more remote parts of the Third World, one might expect a telephone to go dead in mid-conversation and stay that way for hours, but not in a suburb of Washington.

In an Amazon jungle town one might expect a film screening to be interrupted by a malfunctioning projector, but not in a modern movie theater in Tampa.

In Mexico City, the world’s biggest urban sprawl, one expects taxi drivers to get lost, but not in New York.

It is equally surprising to witness repeated breakdowns of the super-modern sound and translation system at a conference in California. Without amplifiers, the speakers had to bellow across the hall so the translators at the back could hear and yell back.

Even the United States’ reputation for quick and easy “pay your money and take your goods” shopping does not match reality. Furniture takes two to three months to be delivered, as do many other durable consumer goods.

Those who manage to pay their money and carry their purchases out of the store often wish they had never set eyes on them.

Case in point: a lawn mower, made in the U.S.A. and decorated with an American flag to show its origins. Because of a design flaw, the instrument needs to have two vital retaining screws tightened every 10 minutes or so to keep the unit from falling apart.

The question of whether the United States has lost its competitive edge and is in decline has exercised academics and policy-makers in recent years and the debate continues.

By some measures, the country is not only inefficient but wasteful as well.

The United States, for example, uses twice as much energy as Japan to produce $1,000 in goods and services, according to a recent study by UC Berkeley.

The Council on Competitiveness, a Washington-based organization of leading executives from industry, labor and higher education, has four standards by which to gauge competitiveness and, by implication, efficiency: standard of living, trade, productivity and investment.

With the exception of investment, the United States is lagging in all key areas compared to the other nations in the Group of Seven richest countries, the council found. It measured performance against an index of 100 set in 1972.

The standard of living now stands at 89.7, trade at 89.6, productivity at 87.4 and investment at 100.4, the study said.

“In 1988, the U.S. share of world exports was only 10%, well below the average of more than 12% that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s,” it said. “The . . . standard of living of the other (Group of Seven) countries has grown 50% faster than that of the U.S.”

The group also includes West Germany, Japan, Canada, France, Britain and Italy.

Even in absolute terms, the United States no longer has the world’s highest standard of living, defined as Gross National Product per capita. It is now second to West Germany--$15,250 compared with $13,840 for the United States.

According to the Council on Competitiveness, the United States still has the highest absolute level of productivity in the manufacturing industry, with $37,800 per employee compared to $36,600 in West Germany and $35,700 in Japan.

But its competitive edge in manufacturing has been blunted dramatically. In 1972 the United States had a 27% lead over the other Group of Seven countries combined. That advantage has been whittled down to 11% now.

Last year, when a book entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” spurred the longstanding debate over United States efficiency, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger lamented that there was “a kind of indifference on our part--a lack of diligence and a lack of discipline.”

Indifference is displayed on many levels, from the sales clerk who acts as if he is doing customers a favor to the airline representative who says a passenger’s reservation is “not in the system” and the flight is overbooked in any case.

President Bush’s budget director, Richard G. Darman, asserted recently that Americans had become so self-indulgent that their country risked losing its historic place.

Both the government and the people, he said, were suffering from “now-now-ism,” an affliction whose symptoms included “collective shortsightedness, obsession with the here and now, and . . . reluctance to adequately address the future.”

He added: “Our culture seems to tolerate this rather blithely.”