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My local paper, the San Jose Mercury, invites "one-liner" letters to the editor. Today there was one which read (slightly misquoted): "From my experience with trying to contact government agencies by telephone, I have come to the conclusion that we are governed by answering machines." I was amused by this, but I think it would have been better to say computerized menu trees or voicemail systems, since, after all, "answering machine" implies getting an answer of some kind.