Live Free or Die Hard

This movie suffers from the same paranoid mythology that my customers believe when they call me at call center jobs. Because they're national chain companies, they believe the company is a perfect entity that never makes any mistakes and that we always know what's going on all the time, about every one of our million customers. Nothing could be further from the truth. People slip through the cracks, computer systems are always malfunctioning, the supervisors are never there, so it's impossible to "have it your way." If we're that big, and "can't pull our heads out of our asses" as one customer said, what makes you think that the U.S. government is any different? Any giant corporate entity is made up of imperfect individuals trying to do their best of their abilities the only way they know how. They don't know everything. That's why when you call Visa and other companies, they put you on hold sometimes. The tougher the question, the longer your wait may be. That's why your calls often get dropped. Or your company will give you the "runaround." It's not intentional, we're just human and we don't know who you should speak to, so we tell you to talk to the guy who told you to talk to us. Maybe it's his fault. The only conspiracy, therefore, is incompetence. I'm certain that this is what happens in the government, too, nine times out of ten. From experience, I know people I can talk to can create a conspiracy out of nothing. People imagine conspiracies about me, in fact, when I'm really just not very good at my job. So I don't believe for a second that the chaotic Washington D.C. street system is set up on some super efficient computer system any more than the lousy K.C. street system is. I don't think that the madhouse we call the stock exchange can be completely controlled by computers, either, since someone's got to buy and sell and affect those numbers, and mistakes happen.