"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.)

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...

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.

This is where the average consumer needs agentic AI on their side.

Many countries and some US states have laws against vexatious litigants. A similar approach should be used against malicious customer service like this.

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...

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..?

> 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).

We’re going to have hold assist soon, so iOS 26 is going to take the fight to them.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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've found that more and more customer support things are being automated to prevent you from actually talking to a human at all, and quite often these tools don't work in any meaningful way. They'll misunderstand, redirect, ignore, or otherwise tell you that it can't help you. Couple this with anything outside of the straight-forward flow of common issues and you're stuck in a loop of insanity.

Dealing with Uber Eats' support is fine when it works and your case is typical - missing food item? Okay, they refund you. Your driver hasn't arrived in over two hours and you don't want to eat cold and potentially mishandled food? Tough shit, you can't cancel that order because it's in progress and will have to pay for the order if you try.

This sort of thing has become more and more prevalent to the point where I actively avoid using companies' products that I know are user-hostile. Unfortunately, Uber/Uber Eats are the safest choice where I live, so you can only really do so when there is the luxury of choice.

Similar to the Walmart example in the article; if Walmart is the cheapest, closest, or otherwise most-convenient, you'll complain about Walmart inside Walmart but still keep going back because the effort required to switch is greater than dealing with random frustrations.

I sort of end up becoming more persistent and escalatory when confronted with these sorts of walls. I've noticed that Uber Eats support is magically better when you use very negative language because I assume their systems detect the sentiment in your language and perhaps escalate better to avoid losing a customer. It's stupid but it works, and feels bad to use, but fortunately doesn't happen often.

If a company only escalates when customers are frustrated to the point of borderline-abuse of a representative, they're pretty much enforcing the abuse and negatively affecting the health of their employees on purpose. It's very difficult to remain completely calm and level-headed after weeks of dead ends and absurdity.

In India, the some of the largest "sludge" providers were telecom companies before the advent of Jio. After Jio, the largest sludge providers are still a couple of telecom companies, but at least the regulatory body is now taking more action that it used to.

Before Jio, telecoms felt free to rip customers off on anything and everything. Charges for caller tunes the customer didn't set or ask for. Unknown charges in bills galore. Large areas in metro cities without coverage. Customer service agents who refused to help, and in many cases, tried to gaslight the customer. Trying to stop the service and move somewhere else was almost impossible, they tried every sneaky trick in the book to get you to stay and keep paying absurd amounts of money for very little service.

Jio changed all that; most of the bad ones either dropped dead or merged, primarily because they couldn't deal with an operator which was, aside from the clearly aggressive business practices, actually competent, plus priced itself aggressively and actually gave customers a lot, and handled customer service more effectively than the rest. Airtel upped its game and survived, Vodafone-Idea is on life support, and the rest are dead.

Now it's a different problem altogether - cheap data and free calls led to unabashed spread of spam and scam calls. Until very recently when TRAI actually started threatening telecom providers, it was almost transparent that the latter were just allowing large-scale spam and scam perpetrators to thrive. Then upper government levels noticed the fiascos during COVID after a few very public and egregious cases, and proper action started happening. This has led to more awareness and fewer unsolicited communication, and a surge of complaints causing punishment-by-network-effect to perpetrators.

Until recently, spam was a nuisance which people would grudgingly try and ignore. Now more people are actively complaining, and things are looking better. The article is very right about companies trying to make customers feel powerless; since COVID, when people had some free time on their hands, they started using some of it to fight against the "sludge" and hold companies accountable.

Brazil, with all the things it does wrong, has a very good Consumer Law and regulating agencies (for public interest services like utilities, health, etc..)

The regulating agencies have very user friendly digital channels for the population to complain about companies, specially if they use sludge tactics (which are specially forbidden by the consumer law).

My modus operanti is usually try to contact the company once to solve my problem, and if not possible, I'd open a complaint on the regulating agencias. Usually under 5 working days the company would call me with a very knowledgeable agent, a can-do attitude and the problem is solved quickly.

Each complaint got by the regulated companies will count towards substantial fines at the end of the year (usually into millions of USD).

And this is key, because decisions at companies are always driven by impact, by having those fines, the government gives them a very objective way of measuring the benefit of good service.

I've never not once assumed it wasn't on purpose.

The connection between sludge and distrust in government is worth emphasizing. The narrow minded and short term focus on metrics leads people in the managerial class to lose sight of reputational damage. Dehumanizing treatment may lose a corporation a customer, but what does it do to government and citizens?

There are some stories in this thread about people snapping and yelling at the person on the other end of the phone. That never works in my experience. What I say is: “I know it costs you money every time I call, and I want to be clear that I am going to continue to call until this issue is resolved. I don’t care how long it takes because it’s a matter of principle at this point.”

I remember back in the day helping a friend who had to solve some unemployment issues during COVID. Hold times > 4 hours weren't out of the order.

Problem: my friend was using Mint at the time, which kills calls after 1 hour.

This was a cathartic read.