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Yeah and unfortunately that issue is only solvable by making those phone calls go to the people responsible, who hide behind many layers to make that impossible
If the person you’re getting angry at doesn’t have “executive” or at the very least “manager” in their title, you’re just making a random worker’s life miserable
It sucks so bad that companies are both completely evil and yet made up of people who aren’t evil and deserve compassion and are also victims of said company. A “company” is really like 6 guys who are fully unaccountable to anyone and are completely impossible to contact.
Yeah. Those working the phones are just regular working people, not "white collar freaks working from home 10-2 three days a week". Please treat them decently as you would all other workers.
Those working the phones are just regular working people, not "white collar freaks working from home 10-2 three days a week". Please treat them decently as you would all other workers.
More people need to remember this. Yes there are jerks here and there but the vast majority of workers are just regular people just like you. They are just working because they have to and they are trying to make it through the day given the weird constraints that come with employment. Be cool to them at all costs.
Absolutely correct, but I don't think she was talking about phone reps there, I think she directed that towards upper management types, who absolutely are wastes of space who rarely if ever do any actual work.
People want to be heard, and they want companies to address problems so they improve; which is why minimum wage phone workers all have premade lines to pretend something will be done about it.
It's a natural response that if someone screws you over, you want to admonish them. It's how healthy societies remain healthy. And once the people responsible don't have to hear feedback (by hiring people to ignore complaints for them), they can much easier stop caring.
I 100% agree harassing employees isn't good thing to do, but I also can't totally blame people phoning up with their rage-filled frustration, as it is absolutely fucked that they can be screwed over and then silenced.
Not that I like pointing every problem back to capitalism, but if people taking those complaints didn't need the job to live, then they'd immediately just quit awful companies, and bad feedback would actually work.
For sure! I ended up speaking more in the general, than to address your specific case. I didn't get the impression you were out to berate, however very frustrating it is :)
Honestly, it seems like there are enough people having similar types of problems to the one you had (like trans people getting marked explicit for sfw, fully clothed selfies) that it's likely they've got an automated trans person detector that just arbitrarily sends people to horny federal prison for simply being queer.
Several years ago I was single and made a tinder account, but got banned after marking my sex as intersex. There was nothing inappropriate or inflammatory on my profile and it happened so fast that I doubt it was caused by report bombing. I got banned so hard I cannot create a new account on Tinder on any other dating site or app owned by Match Group. (Match.com, hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, etc.) I had absolutely no recourse, and couldn't even get a response from their support team.
Ultimately, this doesn't really affect me because I'm happily partnered now, but it's crazy the level of control that unaccountable corporations have and their ability to arbitrarily discriminate against queer people without reprisal.
i seriously cant imagine they have a robust system to actually detect adult content on tumblr considering the absolute filth and debauchery im following on that site
Put trans in bio, sexually explicit.
Post heterosexual porn gifs, wholesome content for the whole family.
When I was young, I spent a lot of time on a practically pre-historic version of Second Life called Active Worlds, where you could build things and it had a basic scripting language and model format. I made friends there (because I couldn't in real life) and they were cool, one of them got me into programming. That turned into an obsession for me, and a career. I wrote scripts, bots, built my own clones of the app ... I was like 14, lol. I wonder where those friends are today.
Lately, I've been watching videos about VRChat and Resonite, and Resonite especially looks really similar, but ... I don't want to go online. I don't want to put my creations on to someone else's computer, or risk being a subject of the 4chan kiwifarms mob just for existing, or think about how much data collection is happening behind the scenes of these "free" products, or how it can be taken away any time with no accountability. So, I have very little interest anymore.
I quit social media years ago. Even when I had a Reddit account, I didn't post, because of the "site culture" there. I work for a big tech company. Last time someone showed up in person (with a resume), they locked the elevator so that no one could walk in anymore without a key fob. I want to write good code that's not at all like what you're having to deal with, but I get blocked by "business concerns." My next struggle is going to be trying to implement the WCAG 2.1 standards in our apps without destroying my carefully maintained relationships with our designers (read: contrast removers and font shrinkers). But, I spend most of my day trying to figure out what to do with myself because the people above me either don't have any idea what my team should be doing, or they're not saying, or they're getting ready to get rid of the entire tech department. I'm just glad we secretly banned generative AI from use, because while it can't replace us and the complexity of our work, it sure can make me laid off.
I'm one of those white collar, work-from-home types that you mentioned (although I work more than 3 days a week, I'm posting now while watching my work computer and wondering when I'm going to be unblocked on a supposedly critical migration for a project I'm not responsible for). I'm so grateful to be able to work from home. When I get frustrated with lack of clarity, I can keep it in until the end of the meeting and let it out and no one knows. I don't have to get COVID every month from commuting to an office, nor do I have to deal with sensory issues like sounds/sights/smells of roads/transit. I can use a weighted blanket without needing to explain to anyone (or carry the damn thing in a backpack) and if I pick my face too hard (I'm working on this one) I can just turn off my camera. And, when no one tells me how to use my time ... I can watch YouTube videos. I can pace and complain at my partner about new bullshit "security" requirements or stupid requests or being asked to fill out critical reports and decide timelines at 4pm on a Friday ("oh, I'd give you more notice, but the CTO just told me this was required..."). I wouldn't have a job if it weren't like this, but it wasn't always like this; I used to be an office every-dayer, but luckily I had my back to a wall, a big desk, and a privacy barrier to help me focus, and I was only responsible for writing code, instead of managing.
I'm probably autistic, and I have been a computer toucher my whole life; it's been my #1 passion. It makes me feel alive to build a PC, or to fiddle with some new technology, or to get something that "shouldn't" be done working, and the doubters give me strength (next project: VR on Linux). But when I think about the world we have today on the Internet, compared to the world from when I was a tiny egg and what I expected the future to be like, I want to cry. We all know how it got like this, but that doesn't make me feel better.
Hexbear is a light in the darkness for me. I didn't post seriously ever on Facebook, or YouTube, or Google+, or Reddit, or even MySpace, but I'll post here, because I feel like you all understand me.
edit: lol, how poetic, this is my 1-year anniversary on the bear site
Good rant.
I don't have anything real to contribute but just wanted to say your rant is appreciated lol.
I work in customer services, and I do believe the whole thing is a joke, brought to life by the necessity to present accountability on part of the company and try to dodge it at the same time. We are literally paid to sit there and take it like a good soldier, explaining the same thing over and over, until the customer starts screaming down the line and calling us names. At this point I usually smirk, I can finally hang up.
At this point, my only role is literally to be a person that they can talk to, as I still can't do anything most of the time. I can ask questions from other departments and gave the answer to the customer. I'm just a relay between the "experts" and the customer, there to take the flak when they feel dissatisfied.
The company I work for is a contractor for a car company. I don't even have a license. I know nothing about cars. Some of my bosses don't have a license. They know nothing about cars. I was lucky enough to be in a training session with one of them, and they asked the coach responsible for the training, what is a clutch. These are the kind of people that these companies put on the frontline to "help" you. I have to say some of us are trying our best, but obviously we won't be using our free time to educate ourselves on this. We make minimum wage.
I believe it is the logical choice for these companies to just completely restrict customers from talking to anyone. If you talk to me on the phone for half an hour that costs like 20 bucks for the company. I'm not sure how much the tokens would cost if you handled the query by ChatGPT or something like that, but I guess you can't even compare. Who cares if the model was trained on stolen content using slave labor, if I lose my livelyhood, or if you can't talk to anyone? The company gave you an answer to your question now their job is done.
The truth is they don't want to have customer services, it is just an uncomfortable complication that comes with having customers. But they do care about their brand image, so I recommend posting and complaining on their socials, you are much more likely to get a reply. At my job, if a customer posts on social they get a case opened and an agent assigned almost immediately. This is not going to work for the big tech companies obviously. Tesla might even sue you lol.
The takeaway is that companies are not your friends and the people you can talk to are not put there to help you even if they have good intentions. The people responsible for these practices are chilling on their private islands not giving a shit, or sitting in the offices where you will not get into, because they have security. But at this poin, I'm pretty sure even they can't help you at this point. It is the system they exploit that is broken beyond repair, and they don't care to even try to fix it. They have bigger fish to fry, as they have to give a presentation at the end of the quarter on profits and growth.
If I have to deal with customers calling to complain about total bullshit, and I've had to do that, tech companies should be forced to listen to me complain about my bullshit
Still mad about my most recent reddit temp bans (+ one account perma-banned because of those temp bans, what the fuck) because I literally cannot talk to a fucking person to explain how their automated bullshit fucked up
The important part though is that those random customer service workers who pick up the phones need to have a way to actually forward calls to the people who can do something about the bullshit
If every call center worker had a button that pushed a caller straight to the CEOs personal cell phone with no ability to turn it off I feel like a lot of things would work better
Excellent writeup. Very unfortunate to hear about tumblr's disgusting actions.
A great tip I got from a friend in corporate that I've used successfully, is knowing the internal email for the higher ups of any given company is usually their first initial, last name @company email.
When you get to them with your problem (delivered in your best lib-ese) they'll usually react by immediately contacting someone beneath them wondering why the everloving fuck they're being bothered with this and tell them to fix it pronto.
You'll get a real person calling or emailing you then.
Try it!
This is good advice. If you can bring yourself to, linked-in can be a good place to find names; try to find someone "too important" to be dealing with you; a director or C-level. As the previous poster said, they'll delegate dealing with you. I've had months long wrangles dealt with in hours by a CEOs secretary that way. Make sure you provide a good contact phone number and be prepared to answer calls from unknown numbers.
Edit: typos
if they dont use that format then just get the email address of ANYONE ELSE in corporate. whatever the format that is used in their email is the format used for all people's emails. very occasionally is the directors emails different and usually that is because they use their own personal emails OR they had the email from way back when the company was starting and there was no standard format to the email address
GOOD post.
Showing up in person to some office to complain directly to a real person that fucked you over is a great power move when possible
I like when I go look up a recipe from a website there’s like 10 trillion adds thrown at me and I have to scroll for like 2 minutes to just find the ingredient list
And there's a jump to recipe button but it doesn't fucking work
I recently learned about this: https://justtherecipe.food/
I haven't used it though.
Not to mention the needlessly long personal anecdotes. Dear recipe authors, I do not give a damn about the backstory of the recipe and how much your kids like it.
The authors don't give a shit about the stories either, it's just that the longer you stay on their website the higher they go in the search rankings
