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Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

> What’s your work email address? I will set up a filter which forwards each unwanted email to you. I will prepare a web page where you can unsubscribe to them 25 issues at a time.

This is akin to getting mad at the McDonalds cashier for informing you of some corporate McDonald policy.

Anger directed at the customer support, who generally doesn't have the authority to make changes (especially at the scale desired), is misplaced and doesn't help anyone.

The whole situation is frustrating, but lashing out at some random customer support agent that happened to get your ticket makes me hope, in a similarly petty way, that they don't resolve this issue until you manually unsubscribe from all the notifications.

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This is a joke made in an attempt to engender some much needed empathy from the team on the issue. Naturally the tech can refrain from sharing.

GitHub is supposedly a tech company, and supposedly works for developers. I would expect better from them than from McDonald's. You can expect better from me, that's for sure.

>I would expect better from them than from McDonald's.

You must have entirely missed my point because my point has nothing to do with /your/ expectations of /x/ company.

My point is that you should not berate and threaten the customer service representative for issues they both didn't cause and do not have the authority to fix. They are simply doing their job which is: See ticket, attempt to resolve, escalate if they can't.

Did you think this particular representative was the person who coded the entire notification system and is the sole person deciding whether or not your proposed solution is implemented? If not, why are you threatening (sorry, "joking")them as if they were?

You can be angry with GitHub without taking it out on the person who is simply trying to do their job as a front-line customer service representative. If I had to guess, you must not have ever had to work in a low-level customer-facing position.

You and I seem to have different standards for "taking it out" on or "berating" someone. Even if the "threat" is taken at face value, the possibility of receiving a few unwanted emails per week is hardly a harrowing scenario. If you feel otherwise, then consider that is exactly what GitHub is doing to me.

It was a joke. Tamper it down a bit. I get that you've suffered in a customer-facing position before, but this is not a measured response.

> Even if the "threat" is taken at face value, the possibility of receiving a few unwanted emails per week is hardly a harrowing scenario. If you feel otherwise, then consider that is exactly what GitHub is doing to me.

You literally say that you would inflict on a single person within a huge organization what you wrote a whole blog post and multiple emails to avoid personally. I get it was a joke, but I'm guessing you can see the irony in that.

Yeah, and if you think that's bad, then it makes my fucking point.

Sure, but it also makes the point where you perhaps should not send that, right?

If you think something is harmful or bad then perhaps don't say you're going to do it to others. Especially when the person is a individual that often does not have control of the policies that they have to represent professionally in their work.

I don't understand your argument. The joke is meant to be illustrative of the problem, to inspire empathy in an otherwise unempathetic party. This requires an understanding of the unpleasantness of the situation. If I did not communicate that unpleasantness, then the desired effect is not achieved.

What would you have done?

We're getting into some philosophical areas here (and these are very deep waters for me, so forgive me if I misstep), but it sounds to me like you think the only way to get empathy is to put the other party to get into the same theoretical situation. I think there are other ways to get others to understand you and get empathy. I don't think you need to make someone else experience the unpleasantness to make them feel empathy, you can communicate unpleasantness without (in this case jokingly) threatening to inflict it.

In this case the person you are talking to is probably not at all responsible for the original problem, so I think the need to consider both the human and the company you are talking to is larger than when dealing with a single person.

Suggesting to somebody else that you’ll inflict something on them that you did not appreciate having been done to you is basically a textbook violation of the golden rule.

If you think what is happening to you is bad, the suggestion that you’ll inflict the behavior on another is also bad. If you don’t think it’s bad to do this to the support rep, the blog post is a bit of an odd move.

> I would expect better from them than from McDonald's.

I would expect better from McDonald's. They empower just about anyone in a restaurant to do just about anything to resolve a problem, short of giving you a refund greater than 100% of what you paid.

You assume the support team lacks empathy. More likely they simply lack the power to do anything more than they already have. I doubt that the support folks have raw access to the database tables for your account and the swaywm repos, for example. In light of that, I agree with the other commenters who say that your "joke" was abusive toward the support rep.

Well, I don't. So, tough luck for all concerned.

Jokes are usually supposed to be funny.

Your response is at best antipathetic; support technicians aren’t going to go out of their way to help you.

Was your goal to rant or solve your problem? If it was the latter then you may want to use a different approach in the future.

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