Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage.

I have had just about enough of being treated like a second-class citizen, simply because I happened to be that put upon member of society-a customer. The more I go into shops and hotels, banks and post offices, railway stations, airports and the like, the more I’m convinced that things are being run solely to suit the firm, the system, or the union. There seems to be a new motto (座右铭) for the so-called ‘service’ organization-Staff Before Service. How often, for example, have you queued for what seems like hours at the Post Office or the supermarket because there aren’t enough staff on duty at all the service counters? Surely in these days of high unemployment it must be possible to increase counter staff. Yet supermarkets, hinting darkly at higher prices, claim that bringing all their cash registers into operation at any time would increase expenses. And the Post Office says we cannot expect all their service counters to be occupied ‘at times when demand is low’.

It’s the same with hotels. Because waiters and kitchen staff must finish when it suits them, dining rooms close earlier or menu choice is diminished. As for us guests (and how the meaning of that word has been cut away little by little), we just have to put up with it. There’s also the nonsense of so many friendly hotel night porters having been gradually with drawn from service in the interests of ‘efficiency’ (i.e. profits) and replaced by coin-eating machines which supply everything from beer to medicine, not to mention the creeping threat of the tea- set in your room: a kettle with teabags, milk bags sugar. Who wants to wake up to a raw teabag? I don’t, especially when I am paying for ‘service’.

Our only hope is to hammer our irritation whenever and wherever we can and, if all else fails, restore that other, older saying-Take Our Custom (买卖) Elsewhere.

The author feels that nowadays customers are ________.