Accountability sinks

I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought.

It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.

Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat

I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario

The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.

Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional

Many businesses build walls around themselves like this.

Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people.

I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes.

What was annoying was the search auto-complete had many variations of "package not found says delivered"

Now, it is a little more filled out but still.

I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with.

I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"

First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?

So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. If things still aren't working, try our online support chat"

So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.

Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)

Made me wonder if I should have switched.

> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)

Why is rebooting offensive to you? State is hard; resetting your system to know state can fix many issues.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40212967

If your microwave had an error, you would be put off if you had to power cycle the whole house. Installed a new receptacle, sure, but operating an appliance? No way. Now you would have to reset your clocks everywhere at a minimum.

I have a linux computer running a public server that has not be restarted in three and a half years. This is what I expect.

Every time I have to reboot my work laptop due to work pushing some updates or that I have to reboot my windows machine because it is running unreasonably slow, I am reminded that inconsiderate assholes have become more lazy and are ok with polluting the whole system, mismanaging state and resiliency, and when the equivalent of the microwave has an error, the only solution is rebooting my house. We can do better.

Windows is awful at this. Completely weird problems with many apps (especially VPN) which get resolved with a reboot. Seriously? It is the whole culture around this OS which finds this acceptable.