Accountability Sinks • Hacker News Board

Re: Accountability Sinks

#281

Post by hkon » Sat, May 03, 2025, 6:31 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #276

hkon wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are helping, why would they be assholes?

You've clearly never worked customer support. A very disproportionate number of people who call in to customer support are totally and utterly unreasonable. That's why it's such a pain to interact with customer support as a reasonable human: The systems aren't designed for you, they're designed for the abusers who represent something like 20% of the phone calls and 80% of the work.

Having lived it seems to me that nice people never get anything.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#282

Post by pixl97 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #207

buran77 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me Plenty of big companies found a workaround. The "forever on hold" routine where they don't hang up, you will eventually. This works perfectly for toll free numbers (so you can't claim you had to pay for the call) and provides just the right amount of plausible deniability (took longer than expected to find an answer, it was an accident, etc.). I have my suspicions that in…

Call in on a second line and ask when you will be taken off hold.

Back before the days that you could do almost everything over internet but cell phones still existed I had to go to a business to do some transactions on a pretty regular basis. Unfortunately they also were required to answer calls during all that and it was very interruptive. Eventually I realized they had only two lines so I'd call in and ask to be put on hold, then ask the guy behind the counter for his cell and call in and ask to be put on hold again.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#283

Post by scarface_74 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #147

Pamar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just an oversimplification though. If you had any experience about travel industry (or logistics) you would understand things much better. Here is an example for you (from logistics): Sending a truck from Berlin to - say - Györ may cost 3 times less than sending the same truck from Györ to Berlin - even on the same exact date. Is this because shipping companies try to make money out of nothing, for you?

And what is the actual explanation that actually makes sense (apart from profit increase)? I have booked flights A->B->C and got down at B because that was cheaper than booking A->B only. Not sure where this all makes sense at all.

It’s called “skip lagging”. The airline can possibly try to collect money and if you do it often, ban you from flying with them.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/23/1194998452/skiplagging-airfar...

The reason is happens is that take for instance ATL (former home). ATL is a Delta hub and has direct flights to a lot of places that other airlines don’t. Between people preferring direct flights and the lack of competition, they can charge more.

But flying out of MCO with a layover in ATl, they lose the non stop flight advantage and they have to compete with other airlines.

Also ATL sees a lot more price insensitive business travelers than MCO. Businesses aren’t going to force their salespeople and consultants on one of the low cost carriers.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#284

Post by pixl97 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

__float wrote: post #203

finnh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that checklists in hospitals have been shown, empirically, to be massive life-saving devices. cyber perhaps not so much...

Checklists work well in high stress situations where you cannot forget a step (medicine, aviation). A checklist in a security incident? Probably helpful. A security checklist to satisfy auditors and ancient regulations? This is an entirely different kind.

Yea, the problem most often in computer security checklists is misapplication of the checklist.

I do cyber security related stuff for the finance and they have some of the dumbest checklists ever.

A more recent one I got was

"We only allow the HTTP verbs 'GET' and 'POST', your application can only use that and the verbs PUT, PATCH, and DELETE cannot be used.

After not replying 'are you fucking stupid' I said

"You do realize that you are using a RestAPI application and that these verbs can go to the same interface to modify the call in different way? Not only would we have to rewrite our application which would probably take months to years, you would have to rewrite tons of applications on your side to make this actually work."

You get these dipshit auditors from other firms that pick up some 'best practice' from 2003 and put it in a list then get a god complex about it needing to be implemented when they have absolutely zero clue why the original thing was called out in the first place.

For those who wonder, typically these verbs are disabled to prevent the accidental enablement of WebDAV on some platforms, especially Windows/IIS that had some issues with security around it. It makes zero sense for such a rule in a modern API application.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#285

Post by vlovich123 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #271

citizenpaul wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>none of the options are helpful Yeah. I got locked out of my capital one account for a "fraud alert" last week. When I tried to login a message said "Call Number XXX" When I called that number I had to go through an endless phone tree and not single option was about fraud alerts or being locked out of accounts. I had to keep going through a forced chute of errors before after about 30 min I finally was able to speak…

Because they don't give a shit about you, they just want to hold on to your money.

Well also phone numbers cost money & that kind of "customer excellence" is not incentivized by anyone at the company.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#286

Post by sokoloff » Sat, May 03, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #236

Ocha wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing…

Sounds like AirBnB support, hired to be as big as delaying fuckwits as possible so the company has to pay out as little compensation as possible.

I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with AirBnB, but I did have one place that I checked into in Vegas in July with the water shutoff. Support initially suggested that I stay there anyway, since it was only one night. I laughed and politely declined that “resolution” to my case and they eventually relented to refund my money.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#287

Post by staticautomatic » Sat, May 03, 2025, 7:00 PM UTC

teachrdan wrote: post #261

selfselfgo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask for something, when they say they can’t do that. I say the magic words “Maybe your manager can do it?” You just don’t accept the possibility of your request not being fulfilled, say they are contractually obliged to do, even if you’re not sure, if all else fails reverse the charges on your card. Threatening small claims court works well. I now do that on the on the second email, do I look like a fool? Yes. Do I…

Before threatening small claims court (known to be a PITA for the plaintiff), I'll tell them that if they can't resolve it, then they should send me an email telling me so, which I'll forward to my credit card company so they can reverse the charges. Then I'll remind them that that's bad for the business because it increases their transaction fees and ask (again) if there's any way to just refund me. This works for m…

Small claims is unbelievably easy! You file a one-page form, pay $50, and then show up on your hearing date.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#288

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 03, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Accountability Sinks

#289

Post by whstl » Sat, May 03, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

Ocha wrote: post #214

macNchz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been on both sides of this—working behind a counter and answering phones at various jobs long ago, and being someone who often surprises family and friends with my ability to extract good outcomes from customer service—I think it’s somewhat of a misconception that being as unpleasant as possible is actually effective at getting results. I fully understand that the godawful CS mazes many companies set up wind u…

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing…

I once lost a flight home (I was overseas) because the website of a company said there was a connecting bus between the airports I should take. The bus wasn’t there. I naturally lost the flight and had a very heated discussion with the clerk who was insisting that the website I was showing wasn’t theirs because I found it via Google (it had the same domain).

It was solved when I found the same information in the email sent by them.

Suddenly the clerk was apologetic and pretended she misunderstood the situation.

There are definitely capital-A assholes in both sides, with people willing to lie through the teeth to someone stranded in a foreign country just to avoid some minor inconvenience.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#290

Post by acheron » Sat, May 03, 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #172

dendodge wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic, but since you mention it, I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV. It seems to be a staple of pop culture that people are always there and the queue is always very long, but I've never known what anyone is actually trying to achieve. The DVLA in the UK doesn't have a high-street presence. I took my driving test once, then received my driving licence in the post. Wh…

Remember US has no National ID card. America has 50 states, each state has its own ID and DMV. Plenty of Americans move states, remember some of our states are reasonably small enough that you might commute to the same NYC job from any of 4 different states. I have a friend who sequentially moved NY->NJ->CT->NY in something like 6 years. Also I forget why but when I moved WITHIN a state 10 years ago, it required a DM…

Real ID requirements started 20 years ago, which I suppose is “recent” in government terms, but not really. In some states everyone has already had a Real ID compliant license for years. In others, notably California, they’ve been kicking the can down the road the entire time.