Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Customs: Whom To Complain To?
Whether to beg a boon or pick a bone, the man of action has always known where to go and whom to complain to. Job, for example, went straight to the top, while others took their problems to lesser officials, settled, like Juliet, for a friar; like Aladdin, for a genie; like Oedipus, for an oracle; or like Dorothy, for an available wizard. It is only modern man—charged with an item he did not purchase, in arrears on accounts he has long since paid, his mail misdirected, his drains stopped up, toaster broken...
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