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Biz Buzz would never make light of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in any way.
But the federal government's slow response does have us wondering if FEMA hadn't fallen under the sleepy spell of "Voice Mail Syndrome" during the New Orleans calamity.
Now that agencies and businesses routinely cast calls into the silicon purgatory of voice mail, we wonder if that attitude is going beyond telephone systems and into the way some agencies handle real people and events.
Voice mail, when used badly, often presents a public face that says: "It's not my problem. Please choose somebody else ... It's not my problem either," and so on.
We don't know how FEMA routinely handles its calls in Washington. But the mentality in some businesses and in Washington that would relegate people to a trek through endless voice mail could also consign suffering people to pressing buttons for help without an answer from a real person.