Please do not write below the line

The most baffling thing here is how the hell did the author get the organisation to respond, on topic, multiple times? In my experience conversing with various entities that are supposed to provide customer support, absolutely anything outside of an extremely narrow set of vetted topics with prepared answers and especially anything technical gets ignored and receives an irrelevant response at best.

It's from 2006, before organizations realized that there were lots of trolls willing to dedicate themselves to wasting other people's time over bullshit.

Might be to do with when this happened, 2006-2007. He did have trouble getting them to respond on topic though.

On-topic? Every reply seemed evasive to me.

(Regarding how he got them to reply at all, this is required by law of public authorities.)

I saw another example the other day of how things used to work. If you wrote to the UK government in the 1980s to ask (or complain) about their policy towards apartheid South Africa you received a personal reply addressing your points in the context of the government's policy [1]. Presumably, letters to other departments were handled similarly.

I've corresponded with the civil service a few times recently and the service now is shite.

[1]: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/10/who-are-the-...

Because it's government. People in government jobs often sit around half the day doing nothing because they have so much spare time. Case in point: me, right now.

Hilarious that every time, they responded in a way that was technically on-topic, but totally ignoring the actual questions being asked. Like someone found one word in OP's question, then mindlessly recited a random form response associated with that word.

Vote Tory 2029! They’ll fix it this time around, they promises.

A Small Language Model...

this is, legitimately and without any exaggeration whatsoever, almost exactly how nearly everyone I speak to IRL as a homeless individual interacts with me. There are a few here and there that absolutely do make an attempt to have real discourse and actually discuss in context, but by an overwhelming majority, most of them just take the (to borrow from a response) SLM approach.

life is exhausting sometimes

If this happened today, I'll bet there is a LLM.

Don't they need to rearrange their Spotify lists?

I am assuming because the BBC is a government organization? I am not sure about the UK but where I come from the government is legally required to answer your request. They have to. Doesn't mean they'll answer your question but they'll answer something. (plus they have to confirm reception/delivery and stuff like that)

To me, it didn't come across as deliberately evasive. It came across like tier 1 helpdesk not really understanding how a query fits into their pre-defined categories, and trying to be helpful anyway without really understanding the problem.

The later reply about it being because OCR does use what's below the line and it shouldn't be obscured looks like the ticket was escalated to someone who understood what was really being asked for.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/

TV licencing in the UK is administered by Capita.

Their contract is unlikely to allow queries to be ignored, and the people receiving the queries are likely to have targets to resolve "tickets" (queries) within a particular time / to a particular satisfaction.

If the query doesn't tick a particular easy-to-answer box, they'll use the best form answer available in order to "resolve" the ticket and meet their targets.

The BBC is independent, and funded by the TV licence.

The TV licence scheme is _administered_ by Capita on behalf of the BBC. Those responses are coming from Capita.

…which is somewhat ironic in the context of TV Licensing which trolls the British public en masse with its relentless and unnecessarily aggressive communications.

Except that you might be missing the key fact: the letter is just a letter. It’s not a form that requests information from the recipient, and the recipient is not instructed to return it. Scanning it would be pointless, because all of the information on it was printed out by them!

Except its complicated. The licence fee is effectively a tax, with criminal consequences for non-payment.

Not an uncommon experience on, say, HN, to draw an arbitrary example.

These are dated 2006-2007. Customer support was still a nominal value at the time.

You guys could decide to fund the BBC in the sane, default way of taxing everyone instead of the asinine approach of trying to tie it to usage at any time.

The website has a page where it disagrees with that belief, and argues that TVL and the BBC are in fact the same organization:

http://www.bbctvlicence.com/TVL-BBC%20hiding%20of%20identiti...

Where I said that the BBC were independent, I was responding to the parent thread which said the BBC are a Government organisation. The BBC are independent of the UK government.

The BBC are responsible for TV licencing, and they delegate (outsource) that activity to Capita. The day-to-day interactions, such as the emails from the website, are with Capita's support service, acting on instructions from the BBC.

The BBC aren't really independent of the government. They like to claim this and mostly get away with it, because British governments tend to be lenient with them and don't interfere. But they depend on taxes for the bulk of their income, their existence is defined by law and the government appoints the person who runs it. A change of government could completely change the BBC tomorrow and there'd be nothing anyone working there could do about it.

The existence of any media organisation (or any corporation) is defined by law; a change of government could in theory completely change any organisation in the UK.

But yes, "the Chairman and the non-executive members for the nations are appointed by HM The King on the recommendation of Ministers."

In reality, I suspect the ownership structure of a media organisation matters less than the ideologies of its directors.

Chatbots from the time before LLMs.

Ooh! I wonder if most of the letters they send out are forms (expected to be returned), but all of their letters are on the same paper-stock, which is pre-printed with the (intended for forms) "don't write below" message.

Evidence in favor of this theory: the "don't write" message is in red text. It's cheaper to do two (or more) passes on one high-volume print run - and then single (B&W) impressions on the smaller runs for each individual letter or form - than it would be to do multiple passes for each and every order.

The support staff wouldn't be privy to these sorts of economic optimizations, so no wonder they couldn't give the guy a comprehensive answer.

That’s entirely plausible, and it was my guess too.

Reading their replies felt awfully similar to how LLMs get stuck in loops, repeating the same patterns over and over.

I assume they’re not really paying attention to you, like if you were a child vying for attention. You’re not likely to run into many salient points speaking to someone who isn’t tracking the basic things an adult should do.