This editorial’s theme is customer service. It stars Gov. Tina Kotek and our own technological ineptitude.

Kotek emphasized how state government’s customer service is a priority when she spoke recently with Bulletin editors and other editors of newspapers of EO Media Group.

Is that just the kind of thing a politician would say or the kind of thing a politician should say? Both, we’d say.

She has been trying to make it happen. She issued a directive in 2023 to state agencies that she wanted improved customer service to be a goal. She embedded it as a guidepost in the performance measures that agencies must show progress on. A report from December showed that most new agency employees — about 95% of them — were getting the required training within 60 days of being hired.

There are questions: Does the training work? Are other employees getting the message?

It is a start.

We were thinking about this state customer service push, because we had on Wednesday an adventure into customer-service land. A certain member of The Bulletin’s editorial board, who will remain nameless to shroud his ineptitude, had a technology problem. The home Wi-Fi went mostly dead at about noon and he mostly works at home. He first presumed he was cursed, offering insight into his technological expertise.

To shorten his tale, let’s just say it took six hours of working on the problem off and on with various tech support people at a couple different companies before the curse seemed to lift.

He doesn’t have enough fluency in routers and modems to tell you which of the three people he spoke with helped. But he came away from two of the conversations feeling better — whether they helped him or not. The third didn’t quite push him to howl and foam. It was disappointing.

Of course, you don’t need his tale to tell you about customer service and how it can be disappointing. And we doubt the next governor’s race will hinge on customer service. It’s so basic to be taken for granted among other more shiny policy initiatives. It is one of the most important.