I have had just about enough of being treated like a second class citizen, simply because I happen to be that put upon member of a society--a customer. The more I go into shops and hotels, banks and post offices, railway stations, airports and the like, the more I'm convinced that things are being run solely to suit the firm, the system, or the union. There seems to be an insidious motto for so-called 'Service' organizations--Staff before Service. How often, for example, have you queued for what seems like hours at the Post Office or the supermarket because there weren't enough staff on duty to man all the service grilles or checkout counters? Surely in these days of high unemployment it must be possible to recruit cashiers and counter staff. Yet supermarkets, hinting darkly at higher prices, claim that unshrounding all their cash registers at any one time would increase overheads. And the Post Office says we cannot expect all their service grilles to be occupied 'at times when demand is low'. It's the same with hotels. Because waiters and kitchen staff must finish when it suits them, dining moms close earlier or menu choice is curtailed. As for us guests ( and how the meaning of that word has been whittled away), we just have to put up with it. There's also the nonsense of so many friendly hotel night porters having been phased out in the interests of 'efficiency' ( i. e. profits) and replaced by coin guzzling machines which dispense everything from lager to laxatives. Not to mention the creeping menace of the tea-making kit in your room: a kettle with an assortment of teabags, plastic milk cartons and lump sugar. Who wants to wake up to a raw teabag? I don't , especially when I am paying for 'service'. Can it be halted, this erosion of service, this growing attitude that the customer is always a nuisance? I fervently hope so because it's happening, sadly, in all walks of life. Our only hope is to hammer home our indignation whenever and wherever we can and, if all else fails, bring back into use that other, older slogan, and Take Our Custom Elsewhere. The writer feels that nowadays a customer is ______.