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I've encountered something similar with Apple. I tried to create an Apple id on a reconditioned Mac. It said the machine had been used too many times to create an Appleid. In the process it seemed to flag my phone number so I was unable to create an account on another device. The two support chats just told me to try again with no change. The first chat took about 40 minutes, there was a 5 minute pause on every respo…
This kind of issue is absurdly common. I’ve seen basically the same thing with Microsoft, Amazon and Google—personally and with others. With Google, it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification… which may not be possible. This hit me once while overseas, I think I managed to get in by…
It goes pretty much like this. If your problem needs “reasoning” that entails more than matching a direct solution, you’re getting the default answer that’s the closest match to the solution.
The only difference between live support and support docs is that live support has access to some of your data and controls over some flows (e.g. reset password)
Now the real kick - it’s like this across the board outside of tech. If you go to a hospital with a problem that is not the 95 or 99 or whatever they are “tuned” to deal with, your pretty much fucked, unless you can be resourceful or luck enough to navigate the structure until you find someone that actually knows how to.
Bureaucracies? Same.
It’s effectively the same dumb machinery with dumb human cogs that you’re always dealing with.
I think it’s simply the “limit” of average human intelligence and find it hard to believe AI will end up being dumber than this.
I have a Gmail account lost because they unilaterally activated 2FA on it with a fake phone number (something like 111111111).
And for Apple, moving abroad made the appleid system crash in an loop and nobody in the support system has any idea how appleid works.
Do not use any of the tech giants for any important data.
>OK, they have a stupid AI that is worse than good old filters. This is an unsubstantiated claim. Right after he said he prefers to provide references for what he says.
Are you sure that a text describing one's thoughts when facing something has the same requirements as a mail to a mailing list? And do you always think using quotations in your mind? Like "Oh I come across this interesting place; it's rather popular [quotation1] [qotation2]; my friend suggested me to visit it [a link to the friend's spoken advise]; etc."?
I am disappointed that none of you are hating on Microsoft Teams. Maybe that's just too easy.
And this is one of the (many) reasons that I have self-hosted my email for the last 20 years. Sure, I have had outages, and one or two times I have had to drop everything to fix the server due to a botched upgrade. But each time this happened it was my own fault and I myself was able to fix it. I have NEVER lost access due to some automated system putting me in the wrong category. By the way, the biggest griefs I hav…
Well, that's actually 3 failures: UX designed to create an impossible flow, AI-based user blocking, and a lack of customer service. By comparison, something similar happened when I was hired by Meta. Visiting the 2FA page caused my account to be insta-locked. It turned out that I had another account under an email address domain I no longer had access to. They were eventually able to fix it with an Oops request. In c…
Microsoft’s peak was Windows 7. It’s all been downhill after that.
They had multiple peaks. DOS 6.22, Windows 2000, Windows XP/2K3 (kinda), and 7. They're trying hard to make 11 rhyme with the histories of Vista and Bob. (I only use Windows 11 Enterprise on my oscilloscope control and instrumentation logging lab box, and on a gaming-ish laptop with an eGPU.)
Windows 11 wishes it was half as good as Vista. While much-maligned, Vista was decent enough. And it didn't show you ads, try to shove MS services down your throat, or any of the other user-hostile things 11 does.
Also if you have multiple microsoft 365 accounts, switching between those in the webapp seems to be impossible for years already. There's a switch account option, you can click it and sign in to another account, except you just stay logged in as the previous account.
Firefox "Containers" are great for this. I have color-coded tabs for various customer work accounts / tenants.