I got a phone call today which I suppose should have upset me but instead left me in a thoughtful mood.

The call was from a woman representing a collection agency asking in rather demanding tones about an overdue payment amounting to a few hundred dollars somehow missed among a myriad other nuisance taxes paid in our little community.

I know. I know. It's my civic duty to pay, but bear with me a moment here because I'm coming to something.

After I promised politely to have my wife call the lady, she shot back at me in what I suppose was meant to be an intimidating tone.

"You know, you're both responsible for paying these?"

I assured her I did know. How could I not?

What the lady didn't know, and what I didn't tell her, was that the reason the oversight of the unpaid taxes had not been corrected immediately is that a substantial amount of money had already been spent for my son's enrollment in a new private school.

This enrollment had been necessitated by the fact that our local public school, to which the local nuisance taxes ostensibly go for support, had proven so woefully inadequate of meeting my son's needs in his first three years there that he had to be placed elsewhere.

Again, I can hear the comments. "Public education benefits the community. Just because you made a conscious choice of private school over public does not mean the community should be penalized."

Hold on a moment. I have a point to make here. My son has no particularly specialized needs. He's a bright but fairly normal kid with a curiosity for math, science and computers.

I'm willing to bet if he had trouble in school a lot of other kids were having trouble too even if their parents are too beaten down and to excepting of a system that tells them this is the only way it's done.

Getting my son into that private school wasn't easy either. It took help from relatives and from the school itself to pull it off, but I have to say that, seeing my son's progress after just a few weeks, I am a very satisfied customer.

Don't worry. I'm not going to pull out the worn cliche about the need to run public education and other government functions like a business. In some ways they already are---like a big business that's no longer interested in satisfying customers.

For those businesses (huge banks and credit card companies come to mind) the free market and technology will eventually be an equalizer as they are with all enterprises coasting on their indispensability instead of seeking new ways to provide value.

Let's go back to today's caller. Instead of focusing on my responsibility she might have asked if there was a problem or why I had withdrawn my son from school and whether there was anything she could do to help.

She most likely didn't know...or care for that matter. It's all part of loosing touch with the customers you are serving. You can probably think of your own examples from sewer, water and trash collection to the quality of your community's roads.

This isn't some kind of right wing argument for privatization of all public services, by the way. Far from it.

It just occurs to me that we may be approaching a social and political revolution at which time we define the necessary quality of a public service and what we believe we should pay for it.