Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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Yup. Showing up is basically always a thing, because even if it’s not an official channel, you’ll end up bothering someone until they help you solve the problem.

And I think most people want to help others, but even if they’re selfish and don’t care about helping anyone, they’ll help you if you’re persistent and physically present.

Like the classic parable of the persistent widow: Luke 18:2-5

“He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3 And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’”

I guess this is one critique of exclusive remote working: it’s pretty easy to end up ghosted by someone in the approval chain for something.

> you’ll end up bothering someone until they help you solve the problem

Haha, I discovered that with my bank. Phone calls were just dismissed with "we can't do anything about it" or getting repeatedly "transferred" to a dial tone.

Showing up and sitting in the branch manager's office until he fixed the problem worked. It was a $600 problem so it was worth the effort.

It's probably modernizing now, but I talked with someone in Argentina many years ago about paying bills and doing banking. They said that the only way to do any of this stuff is to show up in person at the bank, at the utility company, etc. Showing up in person is a developing country's cheap authentication hack as criminal fraud very rarely gets punished and fraud over the telephone is just too easy.

It's quite the opposite, I'm not sure when your anecdote occurred, but everything can be paid online directly through your bank or using payment facilitators. It's been this way for years.

Even things like wire transfers between individuals can be done instantly directly through your banking app/website, where my bank in the US requires me to go to a branch and wait 3-5 days.

> Showing up and sitting in the branch manager's office until he fixed the problem worked. It was a $600 problem so it was worth the effort.

After being on hold for >1h, I went to my local bank branch. The manager told me they could only call the same support line. I was sure they must have an internal path to resolve things. He denied that this was an option. I don’t know if I believe that, as it seems unlikely.

The bank manager gave me that line, too. I didn't believe it, either. Eventually, he elliptically hinted something along the lines that if I said it was fraud, he might be able to do something.

Naturally, I then declared it to be fraud.

As long as you don't have one of those online-only amounts BofA has. ATM access and the account are free, but visiting the teller is not. I'm not sure if they actually offer it anymore, as I closed my accounts with them several years ago. I recall having great difficulty disabling overdraft protection (to me, the whole point of a debit card is not spending money that I don't have--if my balance is too low for my purchase, I want it rejected).

Details: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bank-of-america-to-offer-free-o...

> I guess this is one critique of exclusive remote working: it’s pretty easy to end up ghosted by someone in the approval chain for something.

This! If you've never worked in a very large organization, it's a huge pro to working in the office that can be overlooked.

Disappears if that person is working remotely.

You can visit their manager.

and if they're the one doing it?

This is a very real problem in large organizations. I’ve found an effective alternative while working remote is to escalate to my manager in such situations. Usually they have a little more organizational clout and can get a response.

Unless it's _really_ a very large organization where the person or team you need to contact is often in a different building, city, state, or country...

My local DMV is amazing at ignoring, insulting, and attacking people who just "show up" and ask for help with a process.

My city hall closed for Covid.

I yanked at the door until it opened. Walked in and found employees to deal with…

Even if doors are closed and locked, showing up can still get the job done.

So you broke in through a locked door? That doesn't sound like a good way to get help, you could have also ended up in jail.

True unfortunately. My organization is very much an in person organization that has gone remote with some processes that were still mediated by paper forms. The previous advice for getting certain signatures and approvals was to stand outside a particular execs office and haranguing them through persistence. This is no longer an option nor easily replaced through readily ignored channels.

(This is not a method I would elect, but dysfunction begets dysfunction.)

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