Clearly my first step is to eliminate any personal contact by stopping onsite assistance. All contact will be via telephone only, which means service staff don't need to be local. From voice contact, it's a short step to voice mail, then to e-mail only, eliminating the need for staff to even be in the same time-zone. Readers with any experience in offering customer service, no matter how scant, may think this represents the furthest I can go, but I'm excited by new developments in this field.

E-mail responses can then become automatic, with a robot checking keywords in the hapless user's query to provide boiler plate responses of recommended actions, while ignoring any irrelevant detail in the query such as how those actions have already been tried unsuccessfully. The accepted method of handling all follow-up user queries to the initial response is to ignore them completely.

Yet even this is not leading edge modern customer service. I can remove the need for an expensive keyword analysis robot by adopting a single standardized response to all e-mail queries. The wording reads: To respond even faster to your query, please transmit it by our Web site www.customer-service.companyname.com.au. After the Web page has been exhaustively filled in with lots of pointless (though mandatory) fields and the Submit button clicked, the resultant "Page Not Found" message is the work of genius.

This is admittedly a lose-lose approach, so I'll obviously avoid initiating any of these changes - until I absolutely have to.

Silver Lining

One of the upsides of a downturn, if it does happen, is I might get to upgrade IT sales reps from my current crop of hot-shot cowboys to experienced survivors. Cowboy sales reps (they come in both genders but cowgirl doesn't capture the same meaning) are ones who believe my business priorities somehow link to their quarterly targets. They have only one weapon in their sales armoury: offer bigger discounts whenever I hesitate to accept their proposal. They neither know nor care what our company is trying to achieve with IT purchases and believe a strategic sales meeting is lunch at a Greg Norman-designed golf course followed by 18 holes.

Cowboys have had a good run over the past few years but in times of a slower economy, companies counter-intuitively appreciate relationship and business acumen over one-off price deals, so the cowboys will have to mosey on back to their native pastures, enticing people at airports to sign up for blue credit cards. Sadly for me, most of the experienced reps have experienced a career transition over the past 10 years as they don't outperform hotshots in the good times. Sadly for the vendors, these are the very people who could bail them out of trouble in the lean times.

A more productive approach for everyone concerned is to avoid all that time-consuming cost-cutting work by simply ignoring the doomsayers. Instead we should take heed of the advice of that great English philosopher, Douglas Adams, to everyone in the galaxy: "Don't Panic". If we can replace The Financial Review with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the breakfast reading of CEOs around the country, we could substitute panic for laughter and be better off all around.

Bruce Kirkham is a veteran IT satirist and professional speaker ­ specializing in leading edge technologies and scepticism, who views the IT industry not so much as "dot com" as "dot comedy"