Google user asks Google support for help, user ends up helping support employee | Hacker News Reader

Google user asks Google support for help, user ends up helping support employee

twitter.com

59 pointsdavidbarker19 comments

I've had this same thing happen with a piece of furniture I was putting together. I ended up realizing their phone support was wrong and the manual was wrong too. So I emailed the support to tell them how the step actually needed to be completed so they could pass it along to fix the manual. I guess they didn't understand, as they replied to my email telling me again the wrong steps and that I had built mine wrong.

A couple weeks later I got an email from somebody higher up thanking me.

This is not really relevant to the Tweet but I wish companies spent more time on their manuals, I consistently get frustrated with how ambiguous and sometimes wrong they are.

I wish more companies had somewhere to send (sometimes solved) issues, or even any feedback. I use Twitter to vent, but that rarely reaches anyone past social marketing.

As i like my small screen, often I feel the iphone SE is neglected everytime i get an app update as banners start to fill an app i use regularly and left with a scrollable 14px high content area :) Just let me send a screenshot to someone please!

Years ago I was building a play structure. Part of it was a mini rock climbing wall.

The construction manual was very specific and went into great detail about which plastic rock went with which pair of holes on the wall. However, none of the rocks were labeled, and it wasn't at all obvious how they matched up with the diagrams in the manual. Each rock had a pair of screw holes, and the wall also had pre-drilled holes, but the spacings didn't seem to match up no matter how I arranged them.

I called customer service, and they didn't know how to match them up either. They gave me contact information for one of their installers.

When I called the installer and explained the problem he just laughed and said something to the effect of "Yeah, the holes don't line up. Just put the rocks wherever and drill new holes."

This is very funny but not very relevant I think. The employee explains it well: they don't have live support for free gmail accounts so they can't help. The employee should not give information about himself.

At the scale of Google the employee is effectively just another customer.

I tried to follow the solution but I couldn't figure it out. Does anyone understand what they did to fix their account? Kind of ends abruptly after "hit f12" to open devtools with no indication of what they did in the Application tab of the dev tools.

Cleared cookies apparently.

Kinda stupid 'fix'

That is so insane I almost can’t believe it is real. Is Google just completely operated by robots?

I guess Google doesn't have any obligation to support their "customers" who don't pay money to use the services they offer in exchange for personal data. Unfortunate for the people who build their lives around Gmail and then get locked out. Maybe if it happened more often people would decide it's better to pay for email. I myself am super happy paying Fastmail, but I still plan to back up my data to devices that I control. Nothing's guaranteed.

This is a good opportunity to take it as a reminder to backup your data from Google. In three steps you can ease some of the future pain when/if disaster strikes and you get stuck between the cogs:

1) get your own domain if you don't already, and run your e-mail over there. (so, no @gmail.com emails) 2) use google takeout, it's a service that can e-mail you periodically with a link of your data over various Google services. IIRC it can also sync to other clouds, dropbox etc. Data will be stale, but still better than losing everything I suppose. 3) if you use google drive, install google sync app and let it sync to a trusted computer of yours.

optionally you can also sync your e-mails through IMAP if you keep a large archive, or if potentially losing recent e-mails (that are not picked up by last takeout) is too big of an issue for you.

as a bonus, I try not to pay Google for anything through my main account, to prevent issues with payment, chargebacks/disputes, false positive fraud detection etc.

.. or you can get a paid workspaces account, you'll likely still need to do all of the above to make sure, but your odds of getting some kind of support will be at least bigger than zero, esp. if you don't have a million followers on Twitter.

I have a domain and use it with Gsuite but my domain contact email (to change anything with the registrar like moving the domain to another registrar) is still set to my gmail account. I did that because I thought you could get stuck in a sort of loop if you ever had problems with the registrar. You'd then not be able to potentially access your email to transfer your domain. But the same issue is possible if I lose access to my gmail.com account. How do you handle that situation or do you simply use your domain gsuite account as the admin contact with your registrar?

Additionally, what do you use for your registrar account recovery email? Like if you need to recover your registrar account password? I just can't think of a way to set it up so a free gmail account isn't involved at some point.

So glad I took time to move as much things as possible off Gmail and Google.

I'll set a 6-monthly calendar to check the accuracy of my Google data btw...

Similar thing happened to me when I contacted support for Google play music a couple years ago. The person was very nice, but (s)he had zero detailed knowledge about the product. (S)He was literally searching for my problem on Google and reading from random blogs to me. I realised it immediately because I had done the same searches before contacting support.

Hang on, the headline here should be: "Google support exists" - how do you talk to a live person there?

If you're a paying customer of gsuite/workspace? It's very easy. If you're not, it's impossible.

Free Google / Gmail customers can pay $2/month for Google One and receive phone support: https://one.google.com/about/support

Wait, what was the fix? Did he delete his cookies?

Yeah, described later this was clicking Cookies from the inspector and clearing them from there.

Kind of a stupid 'fix'

This is what decline looks like. All the techno-optimists should take note.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com