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BOSTON

Until then, I had drifted along through the do-it-yourself economy. I bused my own lunch trays. I booked my own movie tickets. I checked myself in at hotel kiosks. I even succumbed whereas an upscale seafood eating-house expected me to sweep my credit card through a handheld computer as if I were in a supermarket.

But maybe it was the election-year rants about the offshoring of American jobs from steelworkers to computer programmers that finally got me. The outsourcing of work to other countries has produced illimitable wrath. But what about the outsourcing of work to thee and me?

For every task shipped abroad by a corporation, isn’t there another one sloughed off onto that domestic loser, the consumer? For every job that’s going to a low-wage economy, isn’t in that place another going into our very own no-wage economy?

I’m not just talking about do-it-yourself gas pumping, which is by now so routine that the memory of an actual person washing your windshield has receded into the mists of AARP nostalgy. Back when gas cost $2 a gallon, self-service was offered at a discount. Today, gas is additional than $4, and, in principally powers of the country, full-service

What’s happening on land is happening in air. We are now expected to book our own guidebook, print our boarding passes and swindle everything at the airport except pat ourselves down for liquids.

In this self-service economy, we also serve (ourselves) by means of having intimate and endless conversations with voice-recognition machines simply to refill a prescription drug or check our bank balance. We are expected to interact with “labor-saving technology” without realizing that it’s labor-transferring technology. The job has not been “saved,” it has been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and boor into the unpaid sector, where suckers ‘r’ us.

I am tempted to say that patron service has gone the way of the house invite but that reminds me that even medicine has been outsourced to patients who bribe do-it-yourself kits to test and track everything from HIV to blood pressure. The Internet ad for a do-it-yourself eye-surgery kit may have existence, I ask, a hoax. But in an era at the time that every operation short of brain surgery is done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has even now been outsourced to family members whose entire medical training consists of TiVo-ing “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The axis of this evil isn’t really globalization, it’s privatization. Consider all the greater jobs that have now grow apportionment of our corporal portfolio. We’ve become our own computer geeks in the same proportion that help lines become self-help lines. We’ve become our own annuity planners and financial analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be health-care analysts, determining what one. star in the brilliant collection of drug-prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our medicine cabinet.

All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposite to, say, independent time.

An MIT economist assures me cheerily that various Americans are willing to accept less service for lower cost. In a society built on the value of self-reliance, I am told, we may even feel good when we put together our own bookcase or install our own hard aim.

But I have however to find an economist who has figured through the human cost of “humiliate cost” or tallied up the transferrence of labor from companies to customers. I’ve yet to find a consumer who has added, subtracted or multiplied the effect of date we are now expenditure on the assist shift of life management.

Remember back when women were asking “Can We Have It All?” The answer turned out to be that we could have it all only if we could do it all … and all by ourselves. Now men and women consider both won equal opportunity in the do-it-all-by-yourself world. We have officially become our own nonprofit centers.

Welcome to the self-service economy, where we are not at all lacking work to subsist done. Let’s celebrate by dining disclosed in the same time. Bring your carrot policeman.

ellengoodman@terraqueous globe.com