I mean you could argue the same for parking right? If everyone parked in the disabled section then you'd encourage having more such parking. And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.
They just don't want that. Because they don't want you to cancel.
Parking spaces on public roads is a separate issue, and it's more in line with driving in a bus-only lane (technically illegal but it is because you need a particular permit -- so it requires more than just being disabled).
My point is that your are jumping the gun with discussions of legality here. The litmus test should be wheter it's shitty to lie about a disability in order to cut through reselling bullshit. Other commentors have more than adequately covered this topic though.
What you can do is facilitate (or mandate) an automated system that allows people to cancel your service with them.
Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
> Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
This was not the point of my comment. The point wasn't to sympathize with the company for their costs. The subjects of concern were other people with disabilities who may have otherwise been helped by the same representative (who probably also couldn't care about the company's costs either). The point of mentioning the costs was that the costs imply they can't just instantly add representatives to avoid affecting other such customers.
A better analogy might be sidewalk ramps, which probably get used ten times more often for prams (strollers) than for wheelchairs. If they were absent or faulty, complaints by owners of prams can help grease the wheels of local government.
Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.
Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
> Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
Wait, what? No, it's like the former. How do you know these agents handling your cancellation weren't assigned to handle similar cancellations from other deaf customers? How do you know the representatives don't have to go through extra procedures (such as documenting and obtaining authorizations for the non-standard cancellation, or bothering more reps to figure out whom to forward the inquiry to) that wouldn't take them far more time than it would take the phone agent? Meaning you could well be taking up a resource that was reserved for disabled folks, slowing down the responses for them in the process. Heck, even if the amount of time spent isn't any more than for a phone call, it's likely to be a separate set of agents handling these special requests than taking calls, meaning you'll still be slowing down this service for those who actually cannot use the phone.
What I find baffling is that neither you nor anybody else is making the most compelling counterargument I can see here, which is that cancellations aren't time-sensitive, so a slower reply would be unlikely to do anyone much harm as a result of slow service. Meaning it's one way you could argue disabled people are not suffering any tangible harm from slow replies. But to argue that it doesn't even affect the service provided to them in the first place is bizarre, especially if you think about what would happen if tomorrow everybody decided to follow this advice and do the same thing.
Though even in your scenario, you are assuming that a company wouldn't adjust its resources as telephone usage drops and written submissions increases. And yes, the point you make in your second paragraph also applies—a written cancellation request places the time onus on the company rather than the customer.
But either way, it is always a good thing if the methods used by people with disabilities are mainstreamed rather than treated as oddball special exceptions.
And this one does the same? Who says that guy going through the emails for isn't otherwise going to be helping someone who is actually deaf?
> This gets around an unethical business practice designed to charge money from people who no longer agree to receive services.
This sounds like the most legitimate argument here, if this is indeed unethical. Not sure what my stance is on this.
From- Someone who works in billing for a SaaS company.
It isn't like parking, because 99.9% of the time, it's in and out in a couple minutes, and 100% of the time you are physically present in the stall.
But if you take the only parking spot, that person pretty much has to go home. The car could be there for hours, even the whole day. Versus two minutes.
This huge moral difference is accurately reflected in the law- it is absolutely, perfectly legal to use a handicap stall without a disability.
Huh... that's actually very much the opposite of how I would interpret that sentence, but okay.
When someone asks me if I know something is illegal, to me, it seems they are being quite explicit that they are talking about legality and not morality, since otherwise they could tell me that that something is not cool, not that it's not legal. To me this is obvious, but maybe everyone else finds this strange and this is evidence that I just think weirdly, I don't know. But either way it's certainly not that I don't try to think in the first place.
Re the topic at hand. I think that people view this as at most trivially illegal. By bringing up the question, people are in some way assuming that you are against the new CA law. Not saying that you said that explicitly, but I think that is what is going on.