A short conversation with a bank

Fwiw, I don't think economic planning is or was the main problem of socialism, more the information gathering that precedes it or the mechanism design that comes after, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone engaging productively with alternatives to capitalism, even if they aren't particularly fleshed out.

This leads them to do things like those being discussed, where they take measures to reduce contacts without solving any real problems. Maybe if "customer satisfaction" were a more important metric than "CS budget," this would be better, but customer satisfaction is very hard to actually measure (how many of us even bother filling out surveys, and of those who do, how many are honest?).

I guess a lot of this boils down to "big company syndrome" where the customer experience is controlled by a series of interlocking factors, but the humans who control those factors are siloed and disincentivized to work together to improve things. My experience is that in most of these situations, people actually do have good intentions overall. You wouldn't believe the ways I've heard CS executives twist themselves into knots to convince people that outsourced or automated customer service is actually better for the customer (and I think they truly did believe it, or at least had fooled themselves into believing it). But the end result is bad for everyone.

"We will start using Google Classroom for all communication, class materials, lesson videos, live meetings, and grades"

Sure. Good. Come grade time:

"Your child is missing a lot of work. It's all due in a week."

Kid, you have to do x,y,z missing assignments listed on Google Classroom.

"Your child has already completed x."

It was marked missing on Google Classroom.

"Please refer to Infinite Campus to see which assignments are missing."

Ok...I signed up for Infinite Campus, and I don't see anything.

"Did you use the user/pass we automatically created for each parent?"

What? No.

"Sir, we sent out this information weeks ago."

Search...search...manual search...I don't see it on Google Classroom.

"Oh, we sent it through ClassDojo."

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This is very simplified. Google Classroom required teacher-provided codes to join "classes" for each subject, provided through...school email! School email is an unused morass for Google Classroom notification emails for every action your child or their teacher makes. Get a teacher message on ClassDojo? Sorry, can't tell if it was a mass message or directed at you, so you have to clarify whether it applies to your kid given their IEP. Got two parents using Dojo? Sorry, can't see if the other parent has already responded to a teacher message. Completed an assignment on Classroom but didn't click "Turn in"? Missing. Can't find where to enter answers? Oops, your child knows to use ImagineMathExploreLinkConnect to get to that material. Completed on that fourth-party platform, but didn't go back to Classroom to click "Turn in?" Missing. Triple checked everything but still a bunch of missing assignments in Infinite Campus? Teacher is behind on grading, and there's no way to know that, either from Infinite Campus or Google Classroom, but it was in the class newsletter we emailed to your child.

Maybe not all employers, but at least mine does not realize quite how much further parents fell behind that year than those without school-age kids, on balance.

When schools excitedly announce a new platform for learning anything, I want to punch myself in the face.

Eventually something happened that triggered a fee, which after two cycles put the account negative, at which point they were able to close the account and I paid the fees. (The balance had been very low as I had planned to close it but hadn’t before the BBVA->PNC transition!)

I’m Sorry you had to go through all that. It sounds incredibly frustrating.

But I miss simple so much as well. I miss how easy everything was. Even with my local credit union… who I would rank as okay, it took 10+ days and over a dozen emails to setup online banking.