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Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

I went through phone support hell yesterday with T-Mobile who is also using a bot now rather than a normal phone tree. It even dynamically generated "phone-tree-like" options later on in different orders and depth later on, all incorrect. It was pure wtf.

me: "I need to swap sims"

bot: "Ok, how do you want to apply your bill payment"?

me: "No, sims"

bot: "Ok your payment options on file are XXXXX"

me: "Are you fucking retarded"

bot: "I see you have a trade-in, do you want to help with your trade in?"

me: "......"

Yea, had to go to a store. I am porting out of shiT-Mobile to Google Fi in a few weeks.

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Angrily request an operator and threaten to sue. That will elevate the priority if any sentiment analysis is in place and get you into the queue for a human.

There used to be some automated systems that would detect curse words and escalate you.

It seems to work less these days, but in the past I would get a robot voice on the other end and just calmly start going “piss shit fuck damn ass” and it would connect me to a human operator.

I used to build systems that did that and other things. When Nuance came out I was like a kid in a candy store just deploying ridiculous features to clients’ IVR systems.

I think this option is being phased out, it seems increasingly hard to ever find a way to talk to a real human on most corporate IVR systems. I've cursed and threatened many AI-based IVR systems and most of the time, the AI would just say "I don't understand. Goodbye" and disconnect me.

If you have a disability or just say you have one, most AI systems are required to have a reasonable accommodation and you will usually get a human quickly. Please don’t abuse this, as it’s like parking in a handicapped parking space. There are a limited number of human operators at any given time, after all.

https://www.tmonews.com/2025/08/t-mobile-cuts-employee-pay-o...

In case you are switching for better coverage, Google Fi now only uses T-Mobile towers. In my experience in a rural area, it's declining in coverage so badly that I'm switching carriers.

Why are you waiting a few weeks? just make the transfer

"live agent" usually works.

I never try to deal with phone or internet providers by phone or internet. Always go to the store.

Went to shiT-Mobile in store. Only two employees working, one preoccupied with a customer that apparently is months late on their bill and demanding to be let back in, and was presenting a expired ID. The second one was a couple which based on their conversations and look, were replacing the phone lines for their mafia crime family.

Had a 1 hour wait to basically do a 2 minute fucking ESIM swap. No, fuck that.

Welcome to the Age of AI

From your judgements against the other clients as well as the staff, might this be a case of "if you meet a bastard in the morning, you met a bastard. If you met nothing but bastards all day...?"

They are still bastards.

No, not really, the clients sound like they have some issues that are inhibiting their functioning and are actually in somewhat of a crisis moment. The staff seem under-resourced and are probably being underpaid.

I can tell you, my friendly neighborhood Verizon store isn't any better. I used to not mind the higher price when you got better customer service when you needed it. Now everything is a race to the bottom and nobody seems to try/care.

Worse is when insurance misclassified a billing response from the hospital/provider and trying to go back and forth to fix it was agony. Of course the skeptic in me feels it may have been by design. It wasn't until the second time I manage to get a hospital and insurance rep on the phone at the same time that things got resolved... hah, can't play phone tag now bitches, you're both here.

That's a shame, I have had much better luck.

Last time I had an issue with my internet I went into the Xfinity/Comcast store, they had reps with nothing to do and someone immediately helped me, they seem to have direct access to management systems that are not available to the customers on the website or via the app. Talking to a human to describe the problem is so much easier than dealing with a bot or voice-response system.

Last time I went to a T Mobile store for an account question they told me to call their number anyway

Phone CSRs can do more than the folks at T-Mobile stores can these days. The stores mostly exist for retail sales. I presume this also applies to VZW and T.

Yeah, the store employees fundamentally don’t seem to have any more permissions in the system than a customer. They often can’t do more than call the help desk on your behalf.

My impression is that the stores hire ambitious but naive young people with promises of sales commissions, and in reality they’re mostly stuck sitting on hold for frustrated customers

None of this even needs a phone call, they could have a highschooler spend a weekend writing an HTML form.

It's amazing just how inefficient large corporations are.

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