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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Very poignant observation. I have run into this as well in situations in meat-space everywhere from the DMV queue to grocery pickup.

Empathy and understanding for fellow humans is at an all time low, no doubt exacerbated by technologies dehumanizing us into data points and JSON objects in a queue waiting for the algorithm to service.

As wonderful as tech has made our lives, it is not fully in the category of "better" by any stretch. You're totally right about margins being too high, but I do hope it opens up possibilities that someone is clever enough to hack.

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One of the things I hate the most is people I'm transacting with telling me something has to be done in a certain way because that's how "their system" works.

A recent example, I forgot to pay my phone bill on time and network access got turned off. I came to pay it on Friday, and they tell me the notice will appear in their systems only on Monday and then it takes 2 days for the system to automatically reactivate my access. No, they can't make a simple phone call to someone in the company, yes I will be charged full monthly price for the next month even though I didn't have access for a few days, nothing we can do - ciao

Systems (normally) model organizational processes, so companies with garbage processes usually have garbage systems in place too. This highly specific case reeks of fraud, and you should be able to report them to some kind of ombudsman so you could get your couple days' worth of fees back.

I would bet they have some terms & conditions the person agreed to that leaves them legally SOL.

I would also bet that the right kind of escalation leads directly to the desk of someone who will give them a refund.

Yes, the terms probably were written when it took two days for a check to clear.

No, the ombudsman probably can’t get legal to update the T&Cs

Contracts by definition cannot bind people into illegal conditions, and there's degrees of neglect that can be considered illegal. The entire point of an ombudsman is to keep actors within "this is not illegal" lines; I'm guessing you could do this on small claims court too, but with the plague and everything it can take a lot longer

I have not been noticing that.

I am finding the poorly paid workers who provide service to me polite and helpful.

Perhaps this is geography? Different in different places?

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