My lunch companions were the chief executive officer of an Eastern Oregon farmer’s cooperative and its chief marketing manager. They said something I’ve heard from all manner of business people over the past few years: The CEO described the dormant, ambient level of anger that’s out there.

Dealing with an unhappy customer is a fundamental skill in any business. I daresay this agricultural CEO’s experience is fairly common. There seems to be a latent level of anger out there, waiting to be ignited or incited. It’s been there for years prior to America’s current economic calamity.

Seeing that we’d had the same experience, I shared my theory on why half the world seems to be walking around hacked off. It’s my observation that all of us have spent too much time on hold, listening to a recorded voice tell us to push one for this, two for that, etc. We try to decode the voice mail system, deciphering the secret number to get a human being on the end of the line.

In a nutshell, we are tired of not being worthy of person-to-person communication.

My theory is now embodied in a book: Your Call is (not that) Important to Us, by Emily Yellin. While Yellin delves into the mechanics of call centers around the world, the essence of her book is about the depersonalization of our lives.

“It is one of the most maddening ordeals of modern life,” writes Barbara Phillips, reviewing Yellin’s book in The Wall Street Journal. The latent anger – waiting to be ignited – has been there for years prior to the recession.”You are having a problem with a product or service, and so (fool that you are) you call a customer help number, only to be greeted by a cheerfully inept or robotically indifferent voice at the end of the line – sometimes human, other times a simulacrum, and nearly always emanating from a source far from home.”

Dealing with the world of automated customer-service demands a level of ingenuity and cheekiness. My family laughed when I asked Julie, who answers Amtrak’s 800-number, whether she would like to have dinner. “I think you said …” responded the simulated Julie.

When our family was badly treated by United Air Lines and was stuck in Chicago more than 20 years ago, I tried to navigate UAL’s phone system. Remembering that United is headquartered in Chicago, I looked in the Chicago phone book for the company’s executive offices. I asked for the company president and got his receptionist. She was receptive to our family’s situation. Eventually, we received certificates that could be applied to future flights. That was customer service.

During one of our Astoria winter power outages, we were frustrated at the newspaper in our attempts to contact Pacific Power. It was during a curious moment of Pacific Power’s leadership. The company’s CEO was a doctor of philosophy named Fred Buckman, whose phone number was not available to Pacific Power customers. From a man in Salem, I obtained the magic number. After I explained to the woman who answered Buckman’s phone why I was calling, she said: “How did you get this number?” Now that’s not customer service.

The most curious depersonalization that I observe comes from political leaders such as our governor, congressmen and senators. They all use e-mail to convey their news to organizations such as ours.

The most obvious flaw with relying on e-mail for customer relations in the political business is that everyone gets a few hundred of these a day. The second flaw is that we don’t know the persons behind the e-mail, and the most basic axiom of all communication is that we attach validity to message we receive based on the credibility and trust we have for the communicator on the other end.

But most of all, politics is all about people and human relations. But you wouldn’t know that from how Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski communicates with the press. I will tell you this, however. After a year of failing to have Sen. Gordon Smith send his press secretary to Oregon to meet editors and news directors, I am pleased to report that freshman Sen. Jeff Merkley’s press secretary will be in Astoria next Tuesday.

– S.A.F.