I once had a car rental company hang up on me multiple times while trying to resolve multiple screw ups on their end. It took 6 hours to return their wreck to them at the beginning of a trip.
I was polite until the last call. Screaming at the last (innocent) rep about the repeated hang ups was the only way to get them to not hang up and actually address the issue.
I was very tempted to just issue a chargeback and abandon their car in their parking lot.
It’s a good thing I didn’t, since apparently it’s now standard practice for rental car companies to falsely accuse customers of stealing their cars.
https://www.baileyglasser.com/services-rental-car-wrongful-a...
> apparently it’s now standard practice for rental car companies to falsely accuse customers of stealing their cars.
Just take photos and evidence and sue them? That's gotta be lots of free money for you
If you succeed with the chargeback and are made whole then there's nothing else for you to do. It's up to them to sue you but they won't since it would risk bringing evidence of their bad faith actions in front of a judge and backfire.
A lot bigger PITA to do with a warrant for arrest or from jail.
Just because there is a legal recourse and you're innocent, doesn't mean it's not awful to experience. We need more good-faith actors instead of assuming we'll be made-whole via a painful legal process.
I once shouted into the phone while on a call with a helpline person. They screwed me over with an invoice that looked like a contract extension (domain, hosting), but turned out was an invoice for a separate, second contract for services I don’t need, nor I didn’t order (antivirus for an e-mail, a paid SSL certificate). A pretty blatant phishing-alike fraud. Later I found it’s their MO.
When the person told me that he understands my disappointment but he can’t do anything, and I need to call another number within the company and, ideally, send them a letter via snail mail - I snapped. I shouted that I’m not calling anyone else and it that is their job to fix it, not mine, and I don’t care which department does what in their company, it’s the helpline person to know this and do all the steps necessary to help me get the money back. The guy asked me to calm down and I hung up.
Not my proudest moment, but you know what? The same day I got mail from them with apologies. They nullified the new contract and moved the money to the correct account.
Shame that the corporate greed degrades people to these levels of pity, and it’s not a lesson I’d like to teach my kids, but sadly: in many cases being the nice guy gets you nowhere.
No, you're right. If it helps put pressure it's ok. It will also help the agent you talked to convince their supervisor to help you out. Because they can say you were irate and that does tend to move the needle a bit, even with very bad companies. Nobody likes getting an email from the CEO asking what the hell all this ruckus is about.
I worked as an agent for a while at the start of my career and I got this too. I didn't take it personally. You learn to do that pretty quickly, if not it's not the job for you. After all they're not angry with you but with the company.
Luckily the company I worked for were not bastards so anything we could do to make the customers' lives better was appreciated. But sometimes someone fell through the cracks as does tend to happen. Devices out of warranty, customer dissatisfied etc. It is what it is.
Was it GoDaddy?
After each interaction with their reps, I’m inching close to start PleaseLetMomGo hosting just to fuck with them
Dropping call is bad, making you wait longer than necessary is also bad. But what's worse is simply having no phone call option at all.
Just like Autodesk[0], you might think that a company that pulls in USD 1.64 billion[1] can afford a decent support line, but that's simply not happening. Even their community forum[2] is stuffed by .... unpaid volunteers. Autodesk employees hardly frequent there.
[0]: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-forum/phone-number-to... [1]: https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de... [2]: https://forums.autodesk.com/
I used to work in callcenter technology. We actually had a feature in one of our systems to make the customers wait even if there were agents directly available. Why? To get them accustomed to long waiting times, discourage them from calling all the time. It is really sick. It was like a fake waiting queue. It could even generate fake messages saying "there's x customers before you".
Of course the companies that wanted to implement this features were the awful ones you shouldn't want to work for or do business with. The ones that abhorred the feature were the ones that cared about customers and employees (usually more EU-centric companies).
I avoid situations like this as if it was the plague but a long time ago I dealt with it for both myself and others who lost the will to deal with it.
This included both commercial and government entities. I never raised my voice, I simply made it abundantly clear that I had a nearly infinite appetite for being litigious in a very public manner if they did not immediately address the issue at hand in good faith. It was effective. In literally every case they did something reasonable and I never heard about it again, even in cases where they had been dragging someone for years.
To be clear, I would have pressed the point if they hadn’t relented. But in every case they did in fact relent. They are obviously making judgments about blowback potential when they do these things, which is terrible policy. Doubly so when governments do it, since they explicitly work for us.
Many countries and some US states have laws against vexatious litigants. A similar approach should be used against malicious customer service like this.
I would like to see laws against constructive illegal practices, or at least an assumption that any forseeable outcome of the company's policies is considered by the court to have been the intentional outcome. Codify "the purpose of a system is what it does" into a legal presumption.
Say, Wells Fargo giving their front line staff unattainable targets for account openings, which was a somewhat deniable way to mandate that staff illegally open accounts for everyone that they interact with.
Or, a gym requiring a certain retention rate for customers calling to cancel. Predictably, this just results in the call center staff illegally refusing to cancel the gym membership, so it's tantamount to a company policy that customers can't cancel their accounts unless they get lucky.
Or airlines that are required to give you compensation, but only do so if you ask, and ask in a very specific and timely manner, for example, hotel compensation for cancelled flights.
I'm actually surprised the sort of sludge described in the article isn't already illegal.
You should be able to invoice for your own time trying to fix their error.
> the book includes a section on what they called “sludge” — tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us
> a number of these obstacles are deliberate tools that discourage
This 'sludge' seems to be a common phenomena. Adobe are famous for making sign-up easy but unsubscribing extremely difficult.
'Sludge' had an unexpected upside when a friend's wordpress site went down when the host demanded 400% more for hosting. I waded through their intentionally broken UI and well-hidden online chat to try to help sort it out, but they eventually admitted (after three lengthly chats over 2 days) it was basically extortion as they advertised at $x but actually charge $(5x). The fact they wasted so much time was what frustrated me and prompted the irrational action of moving the entire site to lightsail, copying across the DNS records, setting up auto renew on SSL cert etc. A lot of work for a weekday evening considering I knew nothing about wp. But it worked!
tl;dr that hosting company's 'sludge' caused such frustration it prompted an irrational response, which had led to a very good outcome (leaving the company for a much better one, even through it wasn't worth it from a purely rational perspective).
I once had a nightmare series of phone calls with Timer-Warner Cable. I had to cancel because I was making an emergency move out of the apartment and area on the east coast. My call would get dropped on every call; I probably made a dozen calls, explained the situation, waited forever, then transferred or call dropped. At one point a rep transferred me to another call center guy in Chicago, he was totally confused about why I would be transferred to him almost a thousand miles away. Instead of focusing on the emergency for why I was moving out, I was messing around with their horrible service. Swore off ever using them again.
The premise of "fuck it" as put forth by the author, when the victim ends up paying that erroneous bill due to the thousands of litres of "sludge" poured out by the offending organisation can no doubt be identified as the root cause of rep's general attitude towards their customers and direct managerial hierarchy.
Awful wages, toxic work environments, long, thankless hours and disparaging company culture - all arguably by design - is contributing to this sludge that everyone reading this comment often encounters.
I wonder if the coming AI Customer Service chatbots will be programmed with “sludge” as part of their operating procedure or can we expect an Asimov-like set of ethics from it where it will optimize to be as helpful to the best extent possible. Software does not need an attitude and it won’t get tired either.
Even worse: I got a sales call from Backblaze a few weeks ago that was an AI voice agent. It seemed super suspicious the way it was talking, so I asked it directly if it was an AI, and it then said yes.
I asked it to talk to a real person: a manager, legal, or compliance employee and it hung up on me
That is an illicit robocall, and you can pursue Backblaze under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. I would recommend filing a small claims court case, there is no gray zone for Backblaze to be making AI robocalls in.
I wouldn't expect ethics to emerge as a feature any time soon. If anything, it will be easier to have the machine do the wrong thing as the machine does not get squeamish.
Lawsuit is expensive. But, would the path to the out door have been faster if she had shown the commitment which comes with laywer time?
Mediation was how corporates tried to get out, but it should demand good faith. An awful lot of what happened to her wouldn't pass the good faith bar. At the end, she'd be offered a damn sight more than competitive finance terms as a future customer. On the steps of the courthouse, and bound into an NDA, but for her initial stake money, and therefore a path only available to rich people..?
AI should be capable of writing to their legal team. It's not like a faulty car is a unique scenario.
The prior art here is claims against airlines. I am unsure how that has progressed in the last 2-3 years, somebody was offering "legal your refund via my machine" as a service.
Or something similar. Speed tickets?
> AI should be capable of writing to their legal team.
Plot twist, their "legal team" (not the real one but the one that you can reach) is already wall to wall LLMs and no one gives a crap.
Serve them it on physical paper then.
Call... with customer service... ?!?
Phone call? Not a chatbot that can only regurgitate what's already on the site and some common sense crap?
It's impossible. Voice calls with customer service are extinct.
We’re going to have hold assist soon, so iOS 26 is going to take the fight to them.
Pretty sure this will be controllable by carrier profiles and mysteriously disabled/delayed for years on all major carriers. After all, they also employ the same tactics.
This happened to a colleague of mine around 20 years ago. He stopped the car (Ford Ikon) by driving into a parking ramp.
Happened again with a different set of Ford models.
https://www.carandbike.com/news/ford-announces-recall-for-ov...
"That X? It was Y."
This formula is so tiresome. There is nothing interesting or novel about an obstructive customer service process. Everyone knows this, and the author of TFA shouldn't have bought a Ford to begin with.
"Sludge" is a dumb name for monetizing misery with intentional barriers bullshit.
Like the "work requirements" bullshit being added to SNAP and Medicaid to take away healthcare, housing, and food from the most vulnerable people. John Oliver just did a segment about this. (No link yet as of writing.)
Like "enshitification" is bad, to describe yet another predictable outcome of unregulated capitalism.
This is where the average consumer needs agentic AI on their side.
This is where all consumers need strong consumer protection laws on their side.
In New Zealand for example, the person/company that took your money in exchange for the product or service is always the one responsible - they can't fob you off to someone else. Products must be fit for purpose, and for a time that's reasonable for the lifetime of the product (not just the warranty). They are required to repair, replace or refund a faulty product within a reasonable amount of time. Taking a company to (small claims) court is reasonably cheap - no lawyers required.
Sarcasm made of gold is not well seen on HN
So there’s even less accountability?
To restore balance to the power asymmetry. Customer agent brute forces against the enterprise to reach a favorable outcome.
Your optimism is based on the assumption that companies will implement a system that will actively work against their current policies.
Look at the AI “support” Google or Facebook offer. Is it an empowering experience or a black hole of frustration leading nowhere?
Any tool is a mirror of what its owner needs it to be. AI will just commit the same abuses cheaper, faster, and with less accountability.
How does this result in less accountability, if for the AI agent to even have a chance to work properly it would basically need to save all of the calls, emails and other information in a persistent way, where it doesn't matter if it's hours or months since the last 'update'?
Just to be clear, this AI agent would be in the customer's control, nothing to do with whatever company it's dealing with.