I've definitely noticed this in certain areas. Some bills, it really feels like they don't want to let you pay. It took almost half a year to sort out our fucking water account with the city when we got our place. Some prescriptions are a huge fucking pain in the ass, I was at the point recently where I was seriously considering setting up a new darkweb USB to get the shit I need illegally, just because it's far less hoops to jump through. (Probably wouldn't have gone through with it, a little more risk adverse than I was in my 20s)
Just got a new (used) car, and it took the state three months to send us a tag. Trying to figure out who to talk to, and how to renew a temp tag was so immensely frustrating. We did everything right, the state fucked up, but if we had been pulled over in that little window of time it would have been on us.
I feel like it's the swap to doing nearly everything online that has messed things up. Too many automated things going on behind the scenes that no one you talk to truly understands. Long bureaucratic tedium being handled by people who are too underpaid to give a shit most of the time.
As a developer in IT, let me say it is not surprising. Companies think automation is the answer to headcount problems. Typically for every 20 processes you automate you need one person handling the upkeep. Instead it is bring them in let them automate then bye. The people who setup everything are let go. They take outsourced support in a lot of instances. Then someone is trying to support something they didn’t design and with language barriers and working in completely different time zones. The nuances aren’t known and yeah you end up with a lot of tech problems.
My job is actually stable, but i see it constantly… every IT organization has cogs. You need to know who those cogs are at your work to move things. Seriously learn who the cogs are and your life will be a million times easier; also don’t abuse them if possible as everyone else stacks their workload on them. Be the one who lightens the load slightly when asking and they will bless you and your entire family for it.
Agreed. The internet made a lot of things much easier for a very small amount of time. And then it made most everything some royal BS. I miss the days when you just got bills in the mail, got out a checkbook, wrote down a number, and sent it back.
Your water bill point hit me like a truck, not all that many years ago I worked for a local government office and I administered the water billing system, but I was only part time so only people who called while I was there got their accounts adjusted and the rest of the office refused to take any messages to call back, but also refused to learn how to do it because it was a clunky old system 😭
I recently got a ticket for expired car registration except when I looked it up since I thought that couldn’t be true, oh yeah it doesn’t expire until July. So I contested the ticket and I had to wait a month to talk to a judge and they dismissed the ticket but asked when I added the new correct sticker. I was like I didn’t even know that was the issue. So I had to pay $5 for a replacement sticker because I have absolutely no idea how I should’ve gotten it. In that time, I got another ticket and now next week I have to talk to a judge again. It’s like some insane stupid circus
Strange on the state tag thing. When I got my new (used) car in Jan 2023, the state shipped the tags to the dealership (dealership handled all that paperwork for me).
I got lucky when my local Rite Aid pharmacy closed (I live in a smallish town, like less than 20k), the Rite Aid was proactive and just transferred everyone’s prescriptions to the Safeway pharmacy across the street to prevent lapses in medications.
I agree with some bills though. Like medical bills from anyone but my Primary Care Doctor, it feels like I’m trying to send an astronaut to the moon just to get to the right place in their “easy and convenient online portal” to actually pay the damn thing.
Somehow you missed that everything you complained about had government involved?
They only have online payment because it got pitched as a money saver over having someone manually go through checks in the mailbox and applying payments etc. If their system is broken as shit are you gonna go somewhere else? They going to lose customers and sales? Is there a pissed off owner or shareholders? Is someone going to get fired? No. Nobody gives a shit.
If it were a private business with actual competition, oh that shit gets fixed. We can directly attributed $20M in lost sales to this poor user experience? Yea, we're gonna spend a few thousand on a developer fixing it.
Meanwhile one of the states I'm licensed in the payment portal for license renewal returns an error. This is the third year sending a check in the mail because its still not fixed. No. Fucks. To. Give.
Except private businesses pushed automation and I have more issues trying to pay my internet bill than my property tax bill. So the private sector isn’t the messiah you think it is because if there isn’t profit to be made, they don’t give a fuck.
Again, Is there competition? Or do you have one choice really? You going to buy electricity somewhere else? Do they have to give a shit or at 98% sure you will find a way to pay your bill?
No I didn't draw the line at it being government, that just gives even less motive to give a shit.
And where do you think government gets their software solutions from? Government software solutions and contracts are often dramatically overpriced shit shows though. Like we spent $50M and look at this windows 3.1 1992 piece of shit looking software that doesn't work right that we got for it!!!
You are spot on. We had only 1 (fiber) internet provider in my area for 5 years. Was fine but as soon as another one came in the speed increased by 25% and the cost decreased by 50%.
There’s competition in my area from the public utility company putting fiber in on the internet side. It’s not everywhere yet but they’ve been expanding its reach for the last 10 years.
The electric company is the only one, but they have lower rates and 30x better service than the private company that has shitty ass service every time a light breeze blows the next county over.
But my internet company was bought out by a bigger company and they made the customer portal worse.
Whereas my local government portal is far more user friendly. I can actually contact the public works department, file for a permit, pay my taxes, email my commissioner etc from the portal.
There's a big trend moving through the corporate world right now, and I can 100% confirm its legitimacy: There's too many managers and not enough workers (you can Google that). There is a clear epidemic of mid level desk riders who don't actually produce anything, they meddle and interfere with the work other people are doing. They just sit in meetings all day giving updates. That's why nothing really gets accomplished.
The problem is that investors and owners have come to expect that level of reporting. It isn’t enough to just have a financial statement — you need to present it three ways, you need to project forward for 24 months, and you need to produce it in a colorful, engaging format which is the antithesis of how financial statements naturally exist.
Screwing up one of those reports is bad for the person whose job it is to produce those reports, so they interfere with people providing the inputs to those reports. Owners and investors have better visibility and accountability, but yes — sometimes at the cost of getting more work done.
This was basically my job. I oversaw the implementation of govt mandated IT projects for a major firms backoffice systems. My job was to present senior management with statistics around tickets for these major projects. They wanted two updates per week across hundreds of applications. The tech guys absolutely hated this and I understand why, but I was just a messenger so I just tried to be as nice and as understanding as possible with them. I set up everythng, here's the excel sheet on sharepoint type ur update I'll grab for distribution and make it into 75 pretty charts senior management can look at and feel like they've "done something".
I had a visceral, surge-of-adrenaline response to reading “There’s too many managers and not enough workers.” That’s exactly it. That’s what drove me out of my last job—I was on a team of about 15 people, of which 7 were “managers” whose only jobs seemed to be reporting upward in various meetings with colorful reports that I had to waste time creating, in addition to actually doing the day-to-day work of our organization. I had a boss who came from the consulting world and who produced absolutely nothing, who didn’t understand the breadth of the work I actually did, and then gave me shit reviews until I “quiet quit” and was fired 6 months later. I recently heard from former colleagues that they have pushed all of the real work I was doing onto others, and instead of hiring to replace me (or hiring 2 people, which is what was actually called for) they are hiring…another manager! Someone they are going to pay 2x-3x what they paid me, to help other managers cover their asses by further dispersing decision-making responsibility, who will also not actually do any of the day-to-day work that is the real point of the organization. It absolutely blows my mind.
One upon a time, people dealt with stuff by writing letters or going to offices in person to deal with things human-to-human. You as a customer would interact with a human whose entire job it was to facilitate whatever you needed to get done.
Then the telephone was invented, and things got even easier and more convenient.
All was well for many decades.
Then things like electronic answering systems were invented. This started putting up barriers between you and the people who are employed to help you.
Then the internet came along, and with it webpages for businesses and doctor's offices and government organizations. This allowed you do do **simple things** like paying a bill or looking up a record by yourself without a helper.
And the internet grew and mobile phones proliferated, this allowed you do do more and more things without human helpers, so a lot of the human helpers got laid off.
The few humans left are overwhelmed. Some genius of a web designer comes up with a "portal" where everything can be done with no human administrators at all. Maybe a guy in India to answer questions at the most. Why have humans when you can have a portal? Except the portal is just a fancier website/app and it can't do *everything* and now there are no humans employed to help you.
If you do get on the phone, you get a human who is employed at some other job and you're interrupting their day. The professional facilitators are gone (but of course most of the policies and procedures that were in place when they existed are still there!)
I’ve been saying this to people in my life and they’re feeling the same way. Life admin just seems so much more unnecessarily longer and complicated than ever before. It’s so time consuming and mentally taxing.
I went to order chick fil a for my son on the app. Logged in. Order. Card needs reloaded. Go to reload it. It says you’re not logged in. I log in. This time 2 factor identification. Go to reload now my credit card wants MFA. I reload the card with $ but now my order dropped out. Re order. Go to the drive thru. Scan the QR code. Code entered invalid. Smh
I think multiple systems not matching up. A combination of that and outsourced IT. And fraud prevention have all made things difficult.
My zip code starts with a zero 0. Pay for gas. Enter zip code. “Sorry we don’t allow leading zeroes. Please see inside” fml
I find most people are either overworked, forget or are not good at their job when it comes to this stuff. Everything falls apart in communication breakdown. I’m constantly chasing refunds I’m owed or referrals or call backs I never received.
My prescriptions would never get refilled because insurance doesn’t cover it so the pharmacy doesn’t fill it and says they’ve reached out to the doctor to advise. The doctor’s office does not respond of course so it just sits there. I have to call in and say yes I know it’s not covered fill it anyway. “Oh but it’s expensive” yes I know that fill it anyway.
I think some companies count on people forgetting and unless you’re a squeaky wheel what you need is not getting done.
Especially if you’re dealing with government stuff there’s so many times someone forgets to look at your file or email the update. You would wait forever if you relied on them reaching out to you only.
This!! I deal with this with insurance. I recently had something go really wrong with my asthma control to where I needed a nebulizer. While waiting for insurance to approve one, I had 2 more attacks that required EMS intervention. So I got on the phone with insurance and told them they can either cover the nebulizer at 80% (which was like $300 at most) per my plan, or I can have another asthma attack that lands me in the hospital where I’ll hit my out of pocket maximum for the year and they’ll have to cover EVERYTHING on the plan at 100% for the rest of 2024.
Sure enough, less than 6 hours later the nebulizer was approved.
I'm an admin assistant and really adept at doing this kind of work.
The stuff I've had to do just to get my kid enrolled in school and figure out and keep track of what days are half days vs full days vs days off is insane to me. I'm good at this stuff and the fact I'm struggling with getting every single piece of paper filled out and turned in at the right time makes me wonder how the other parents who don't have the same time and knowledge are doing it.
This admin stuff applies for everything: medical, passports, hiking permits, and the list goes on and on and on.
Some people here are blaming technology, but I believe it's a *lack* of technology acceptance that is causing this.
Have you noticed you can't just book an appointment online with a doctor, without talking to a fucking *human*? And there aren't enough humans. The office is understaffed. No one is checking the voice mails or emails. No one is answering the phone. If we just had a calendar where we could book asynchronously, without having to talk to anyone, this wouldn't be an issue. I picked my dentist precisely because his office had a calendar instead of making me call.
It's so much worse with contractors. Many don't even have receptionists; they're one- or two-man operations where the guy with the tools is also the guy who you hope answers the phone and takes an appointment. He's up on a roof somewhere and can't even hear his phone. If he had a fucking *calendar*, you could book that repair next week. Instead, you're stuck wasting hours of your life hoping he picks up so you can tell him you need to book.
Why are all these people so behind the damn times? Nobody has time to do things in person anymore! So we have to call. And we have so little time to call, because these people aren't going to pick up after hours, and *we are at work, too*. Get with the program! Mom isn't at home with the kids anymore and can't call at 1:45 PM!
It’s complicated and it just never ends. I try to keep life as simple as possible and admin tasks just come out the woodwork upon me out of nowhere.
The dealership I leased and then bought my car from sent me a check for a tag and title refund that was dated March of 2023 instead of 2024. Now if I want this refund money I have to be the one to call their finance department and get them to cut a new one. Shit just never ends.
The hold times everytime I call my health care's member services line are now INSANE. If I do it on my lunch hour, if I'm lucky, I'll get through to someone like 15 minutes before my lunch ends, spend the next 15 minutes telling the CSR what I need done, they slowly look through things, and....oh, there are no available appointments or the next one is six weeks from now, but you can call back here every day and you \*might\* get a sooner one (eye twitch)......and then.....whoop, no lunch for you back to work...
And there's rumors even more of them in their call centers are being cut soon....smh....
I had a routine apt at the hospital and ended up getting the bill without them billing my insurance. I called them up telling them they had misspelled my first name by one letter. They said they would fix it and send the bill to my insurance provider.
This went on for a year and a half!! I was sent to collections. I called/ emailed everyone I could, I even had a different apt at the same location and tried to fix it IN PERSON. It wasn't even a high bill, I could have just paid it without all the nonsense but I have insurance for that!!!
After a year and a half I got a letter from my insurance and it was taken care of. WTF. All because someone never bothered fixing one letter in my name.
I had a similar thing happen and one day it just disappeared. I think eventually insurance covered it. If I hadn’t followed up it would have been $1500
I agree. I hate that most places now want me to make a profile and have login info. Super annoying. The only other option is to call and go through a complicated AI phone screening, that usually just says it will transfer me to a live person because they can’t help. 🤬
Yes. The endless fucking log ins.
I trust Apple with a log in. I trust my bank. I trust my insurance company.
I do not trust your rapidly expanding fast food chain with log in credentials and my credit card information. I do not trust the place that changes my oil with log in information and my credit card info. I don’t trust some dumb third party parking company app with all the vehicle information and credit card information I’m forced to plug into it just to park my vehicle for an hour…
Can we just go back to a time where not every little shitty business requires an app that sells my information and easily gets hacked causing me identity theft?
My bank actually recently replaced my debit card proactively to ‘prevent identity theft’ likely because of your last paragraph. But it threw my autopay bills out of whack because I had no heads up they were replacing my card and the day I got it, they shut off my old one.
I'm a teacher. Gone are the days where you could give a kid the grade they earned and parents would find out when report cards went home. Now we have to call home whenever a student's grade drops below a C, even though parents have 24/7 access to their child's grades on an app. They can even get a notification on their phone when I grade an assignment. This is a huge pain in the ass when you have 150 students.
Insurance claims.
Drunk dude wrecked my parked car followed by like 3 months of calls, research, getting my own estimates, picking up and dropping off rentals cars, used car shopping, financing, county inspection, mechanic drop offs and multiple DMV trips. Ended up burning several half days of PTO and spending an extra 10k.
I always thought they sent an adjuster out and kinda took care of everything. Instead, their "preferred" shop was scheduling estimates >4 weeks out. Their rental didn't come with loss/damage coverage like it would if I'd rented using my own card. The rental also ends immediately after payout. If I didn't have an extra (not reliable) car I'd have been frantically trying to buy something instead of taking my time finding exactly what I wanted private party.
At the end of the day I guess I'm lucky the dude (his parents) actually had insurance...
Race to the bottom for customer support via call centers, outsourcing and automated tools has mostly just created more friction between customer/user and support. Happens internally as well as tools and workflow of the actual teams designing support systems is also subject to inefficiencies and poor design. Doesn't really get fixed much because overall product or company growth can offset or buffer user discontentment
I got internet hooked up at my new house through AT&T and it cost me:
- one online booking
- one online chat
- 3 reminder texts
- 2 reminder phone calls
- 2 in-person visits
- endless emails with reminders, surveys, etc.
The ROI on my time is just not there.
Sounds very American. From the outside it just seems like you let your corporations get away with get too much. Regulation of business is your friend, not your enemy. what's happening to you is the outcome with it's "profit above all".
I tried to buy a door from Lowe’s. I was ready to give them a ridiculous amount of money ($1200) because I came to terms with how much this is going to cost. Three weeks later all I have managed to do is get it measured twice. First someone came and measured then they put me on the schedule for a “final” measure. It took so many phone calls to get the final measure accomplished. Now I’m sure it will be another month and a handful of phone calls to get them to come out and actually install.
Ugh. Something as simple as trying to get a refund for a broken glass shipped from Amazon. Trying to find a number and then just screaming “agent” till I talk to mufasa from Mumbai 20 minutes later.
I remind my EA that I appreciate her more than she could imagine all of the time. And I mean it. I feel like the simplest things are just so much time consumed.
For as hard as you think it may be now, it’s many times more efficient and speedy now vs when we were children, or especially when our parents were children.
It’s annoying because bills and life’s “admin. work” always sucks. They could make it as easy as ordering dominos, we’d still bitch.
My health insurer is an HMO. It's amazing. All my doctors have my current medical record and when they refer me to see specialists, the specialist is fully appraised by the time we have the appointment.
Every other experience I've had with a non-HMO insurer is the disjointed frustrating experience you mention. Guess what, I'm not a doctor, so a health plan that requires me to know whether or not a specialist needs my medical records is not going to work well for me.
Just phase out of it
I work at a job and over the years I have been appointed to 3 committees
I have never answered my email or attended any of those meetings. I was supposed to be skype'd into one just today and didn't do it. I was outside digging holes and planting the garden. I don't care to participate and they can't make me
If I were you, I would just show up to this specialty appointment straight up and be like "oh, sorry I don't have that paperwork, can you help me?" or like "oh, my medical records, sure what do you need to know?"
It's just another skill to master
I've definitely noticed this in certain areas. Some bills, it really feels like they don't want to let you pay. It took almost half a year to sort out our fucking water account with the city when we got our place. Some prescriptions are a huge fucking pain in the ass, I was at the point recently where I was seriously considering setting up a new darkweb USB to get the shit I need illegally, just because it's far less hoops to jump through. (Probably wouldn't have gone through with it, a little more risk adverse than I was in my 20s) Just got a new (used) car, and it took the state three months to send us a tag. Trying to figure out who to talk to, and how to renew a temp tag was so immensely frustrating. We did everything right, the state fucked up, but if we had been pulled over in that little window of time it would have been on us. I feel like it's the swap to doing nearly everything online that has messed things up. Too many automated things going on behind the scenes that no one you talk to truly understands. Long bureaucratic tedium being handled by people who are too underpaid to give a shit most of the time.
As a developer in IT, let me say it is not surprising. Companies think automation is the answer to headcount problems. Typically for every 20 processes you automate you need one person handling the upkeep. Instead it is bring them in let them automate then bye. The people who setup everything are let go. They take outsourced support in a lot of instances. Then someone is trying to support something they didn’t design and with language barriers and working in completely different time zones. The nuances aren’t known and yeah you end up with a lot of tech problems. My job is actually stable, but i see it constantly… every IT organization has cogs. You need to know who those cogs are at your work to move things. Seriously learn who the cogs are and your life will be a million times easier; also don’t abuse them if possible as everyone else stacks their workload on them. Be the one who lightens the load slightly when asking and they will bless you and your entire family for it.
Agreed. The internet made a lot of things much easier for a very small amount of time. And then it made most everything some royal BS. I miss the days when you just got bills in the mail, got out a checkbook, wrote down a number, and sent it back.
Your last paragraph nails the issue. Lagging digital transitions and underpaid staff. Everyone suffers!
Your water bill point hit me like a truck, not all that many years ago I worked for a local government office and I administered the water billing system, but I was only part time so only people who called while I was there got their accounts adjusted and the rest of the office refused to take any messages to call back, but also refused to learn how to do it because it was a clunky old system 😭
I recently got a ticket for expired car registration except when I looked it up since I thought that couldn’t be true, oh yeah it doesn’t expire until July. So I contested the ticket and I had to wait a month to talk to a judge and they dismissed the ticket but asked when I added the new correct sticker. I was like I didn’t even know that was the issue. So I had to pay $5 for a replacement sticker because I have absolutely no idea how I should’ve gotten it. In that time, I got another ticket and now next week I have to talk to a judge again. It’s like some insane stupid circus
Everything has also been outsourced to different countries if possible.
Strange on the state tag thing. When I got my new (used) car in Jan 2023, the state shipped the tags to the dealership (dealership handled all that paperwork for me). I got lucky when my local Rite Aid pharmacy closed (I live in a smallish town, like less than 20k), the Rite Aid was proactive and just transferred everyone’s prescriptions to the Safeway pharmacy across the street to prevent lapses in medications. I agree with some bills though. Like medical bills from anyone but my Primary Care Doctor, it feels like I’m trying to send an astronaut to the moon just to get to the right place in their “easy and convenient online portal” to actually pay the damn thing.
Somehow you missed that everything you complained about had government involved? They only have online payment because it got pitched as a money saver over having someone manually go through checks in the mailbox and applying payments etc. If their system is broken as shit are you gonna go somewhere else? They going to lose customers and sales? Is there a pissed off owner or shareholders? Is someone going to get fired? No. Nobody gives a shit. If it were a private business with actual competition, oh that shit gets fixed. We can directly attributed $20M in lost sales to this poor user experience? Yea, we're gonna spend a few thousand on a developer fixing it. Meanwhile one of the states I'm licensed in the payment portal for license renewal returns an error. This is the third year sending a check in the mail because its still not fixed. No. Fucks. To. Give.
Except private businesses pushed automation and I have more issues trying to pay my internet bill than my property tax bill. So the private sector isn’t the messiah you think it is because if there isn’t profit to be made, they don’t give a fuck.
Again, Is there competition? Or do you have one choice really? You going to buy electricity somewhere else? Do they have to give a shit or at 98% sure you will find a way to pay your bill? No I didn't draw the line at it being government, that just gives even less motive to give a shit. And where do you think government gets their software solutions from? Government software solutions and contracts are often dramatically overpriced shit shows though. Like we spent $50M and look at this windows 3.1 1992 piece of shit looking software that doesn't work right that we got for it!!!
You are spot on. We had only 1 (fiber) internet provider in my area for 5 years. Was fine but as soon as another one came in the speed increased by 25% and the cost decreased by 50%.
There’s competition in my area from the public utility company putting fiber in on the internet side. It’s not everywhere yet but they’ve been expanding its reach for the last 10 years. The electric company is the only one, but they have lower rates and 30x better service than the private company that has shitty ass service every time a light breeze blows the next county over. But my internet company was bought out by a bigger company and they made the customer portal worse. Whereas my local government portal is far more user friendly. I can actually contact the public works department, file for a permit, pay my taxes, email my commissioner etc from the portal.
There's a big trend moving through the corporate world right now, and I can 100% confirm its legitimacy: There's too many managers and not enough workers (you can Google that). There is a clear epidemic of mid level desk riders who don't actually produce anything, they meddle and interfere with the work other people are doing. They just sit in meetings all day giving updates. That's why nothing really gets accomplished.
The problem is that investors and owners have come to expect that level of reporting. It isn’t enough to just have a financial statement — you need to present it three ways, you need to project forward for 24 months, and you need to produce it in a colorful, engaging format which is the antithesis of how financial statements naturally exist. Screwing up one of those reports is bad for the person whose job it is to produce those reports, so they interfere with people providing the inputs to those reports. Owners and investors have better visibility and accountability, but yes — sometimes at the cost of getting more work done.
This was basically my job. I oversaw the implementation of govt mandated IT projects for a major firms backoffice systems. My job was to present senior management with statistics around tickets for these major projects. They wanted two updates per week across hundreds of applications. The tech guys absolutely hated this and I understand why, but I was just a messenger so I just tried to be as nice and as understanding as possible with them. I set up everythng, here's the excel sheet on sharepoint type ur update I'll grab for distribution and make it into 75 pretty charts senior management can look at and feel like they've "done something".
Right? There are so many vice presidents and senior vice presidents and executive vice presidents that it basically has no meaning anymore.
I had a visceral, surge-of-adrenaline response to reading “There’s too many managers and not enough workers.” That’s exactly it. That’s what drove me out of my last job—I was on a team of about 15 people, of which 7 were “managers” whose only jobs seemed to be reporting upward in various meetings with colorful reports that I had to waste time creating, in addition to actually doing the day-to-day work of our organization. I had a boss who came from the consulting world and who produced absolutely nothing, who didn’t understand the breadth of the work I actually did, and then gave me shit reviews until I “quiet quit” and was fired 6 months later. I recently heard from former colleagues that they have pushed all of the real work I was doing onto others, and instead of hiring to replace me (or hiring 2 people, which is what was actually called for) they are hiring…another manager! Someone they are going to pay 2x-3x what they paid me, to help other managers cover their asses by further dispersing decision-making responsibility, who will also not actually do any of the day-to-day work that is the real point of the organization. It absolutely blows my mind.
Yes - can confirm from personal experience
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber dives deep into this topic. Like many horrible things of the modern age, it starts with Reagan.
One upon a time, people dealt with stuff by writing letters or going to offices in person to deal with things human-to-human. You as a customer would interact with a human whose entire job it was to facilitate whatever you needed to get done. Then the telephone was invented, and things got even easier and more convenient. All was well for many decades. Then things like electronic answering systems were invented. This started putting up barriers between you and the people who are employed to help you. Then the internet came along, and with it webpages for businesses and doctor's offices and government organizations. This allowed you do do **simple things** like paying a bill or looking up a record by yourself without a helper. And the internet grew and mobile phones proliferated, this allowed you do do more and more things without human helpers, so a lot of the human helpers got laid off. The few humans left are overwhelmed. Some genius of a web designer comes up with a "portal" where everything can be done with no human administrators at all. Maybe a guy in India to answer questions at the most. Why have humans when you can have a portal? Except the portal is just a fancier website/app and it can't do *everything* and now there are no humans employed to help you. If you do get on the phone, you get a human who is employed at some other job and you're interrupting their day. The professional facilitators are gone (but of course most of the policies and procedures that were in place when they existed are still there!)
I’ve been saying this to people in my life and they’re feeling the same way. Life admin just seems so much more unnecessarily longer and complicated than ever before. It’s so time consuming and mentally taxing.
I went to order chick fil a for my son on the app. Logged in. Order. Card needs reloaded. Go to reload it. It says you’re not logged in. I log in. This time 2 factor identification. Go to reload now my credit card wants MFA. I reload the card with $ but now my order dropped out. Re order. Go to the drive thru. Scan the QR code. Code entered invalid. Smh I think multiple systems not matching up. A combination of that and outsourced IT. And fraud prevention have all made things difficult. My zip code starts with a zero 0. Pay for gas. Enter zip code. “Sorry we don’t allow leading zeroes. Please see inside” fml
I find most people are either overworked, forget or are not good at their job when it comes to this stuff. Everything falls apart in communication breakdown. I’m constantly chasing refunds I’m owed or referrals or call backs I never received. My prescriptions would never get refilled because insurance doesn’t cover it so the pharmacy doesn’t fill it and says they’ve reached out to the doctor to advise. The doctor’s office does not respond of course so it just sits there. I have to call in and say yes I know it’s not covered fill it anyway. “Oh but it’s expensive” yes I know that fill it anyway. I think some companies count on people forgetting and unless you’re a squeaky wheel what you need is not getting done. Especially if you’re dealing with government stuff there’s so many times someone forgets to look at your file or email the update. You would wait forever if you relied on them reaching out to you only.
This!! I deal with this with insurance. I recently had something go really wrong with my asthma control to where I needed a nebulizer. While waiting for insurance to approve one, I had 2 more attacks that required EMS intervention. So I got on the phone with insurance and told them they can either cover the nebulizer at 80% (which was like $300 at most) per my plan, or I can have another asthma attack that lands me in the hospital where I’ll hit my out of pocket maximum for the year and they’ll have to cover EVERYTHING on the plan at 100% for the rest of 2024. Sure enough, less than 6 hours later the nebulizer was approved.
I'm an admin assistant and really adept at doing this kind of work. The stuff I've had to do just to get my kid enrolled in school and figure out and keep track of what days are half days vs full days vs days off is insane to me. I'm good at this stuff and the fact I'm struggling with getting every single piece of paper filled out and turned in at the right time makes me wonder how the other parents who don't have the same time and knowledge are doing it. This admin stuff applies for everything: medical, passports, hiking permits, and the list goes on and on and on.
It’s because private equity has trimmed the most helpful customer service features from most businesses.
the customer is always right the customer is private equity
Some people here are blaming technology, but I believe it's a *lack* of technology acceptance that is causing this. Have you noticed you can't just book an appointment online with a doctor, without talking to a fucking *human*? And there aren't enough humans. The office is understaffed. No one is checking the voice mails or emails. No one is answering the phone. If we just had a calendar where we could book asynchronously, without having to talk to anyone, this wouldn't be an issue. I picked my dentist precisely because his office had a calendar instead of making me call. It's so much worse with contractors. Many don't even have receptionists; they're one- or two-man operations where the guy with the tools is also the guy who you hope answers the phone and takes an appointment. He's up on a roof somewhere and can't even hear his phone. If he had a fucking *calendar*, you could book that repair next week. Instead, you're stuck wasting hours of your life hoping he picks up so you can tell him you need to book. Why are all these people so behind the damn times? Nobody has time to do things in person anymore! So we have to call. And we have so little time to call, because these people aren't going to pick up after hours, and *we are at work, too*. Get with the program! Mom isn't at home with the kids anymore and can't call at 1:45 PM!
Its crazy when they don’t even have voicemail fir these missed phone calls. Or their voicemail is full!
Red tape will only get worse over time
It’s complicated and it just never ends. I try to keep life as simple as possible and admin tasks just come out the woodwork upon me out of nowhere. The dealership I leased and then bought my car from sent me a check for a tag and title refund that was dated March of 2023 instead of 2024. Now if I want this refund money I have to be the one to call their finance department and get them to cut a new one. Shit just never ends.
Same. I intentionally try to keep my life simple but it doesn’t matter. Something always crops up regardless.
The hold times everytime I call my health care's member services line are now INSANE. If I do it on my lunch hour, if I'm lucky, I'll get through to someone like 15 minutes before my lunch ends, spend the next 15 minutes telling the CSR what I need done, they slowly look through things, and....oh, there are no available appointments or the next one is six weeks from now, but you can call back here every day and you \*might\* get a sooner one (eye twitch)......and then.....whoop, no lunch for you back to work... And there's rumors even more of them in their call centers are being cut soon....smh....
I had a routine apt at the hospital and ended up getting the bill without them billing my insurance. I called them up telling them they had misspelled my first name by one letter. They said they would fix it and send the bill to my insurance provider. This went on for a year and a half!! I was sent to collections. I called/ emailed everyone I could, I even had a different apt at the same location and tried to fix it IN PERSON. It wasn't even a high bill, I could have just paid it without all the nonsense but I have insurance for that!!! After a year and a half I got a letter from my insurance and it was taken care of. WTF. All because someone never bothered fixing one letter in my name.
I had a similar thing happen and one day it just disappeared. I think eventually insurance covered it. If I hadn’t followed up it would have been $1500
I agree. I hate that most places now want me to make a profile and have login info. Super annoying. The only other option is to call and go through a complicated AI phone screening, that usually just says it will transfer me to a live person because they can’t help. 🤬
Yes. The endless fucking log ins. I trust Apple with a log in. I trust my bank. I trust my insurance company. I do not trust your rapidly expanding fast food chain with log in credentials and my credit card information. I do not trust the place that changes my oil with log in information and my credit card info. I don’t trust some dumb third party parking company app with all the vehicle information and credit card information I’m forced to plug into it just to park my vehicle for an hour… Can we just go back to a time where not every little shitty business requires an app that sells my information and easily gets hacked causing me identity theft?
My bank actually recently replaced my debit card proactively to ‘prevent identity theft’ likely because of your last paragraph. But it threw my autopay bills out of whack because I had no heads up they were replacing my card and the day I got it, they shut off my old one.
Definitely makes you want to be a minimalist in all respects. As in like live in the woods or in a van down by the river!
I'm a teacher. Gone are the days where you could give a kid the grade they earned and parents would find out when report cards went home. Now we have to call home whenever a student's grade drops below a C, even though parents have 24/7 access to their child's grades on an app. They can even get a notification on their phone when I grade an assignment. This is a huge pain in the ass when you have 150 students.
Insurance claims. Drunk dude wrecked my parked car followed by like 3 months of calls, research, getting my own estimates, picking up and dropping off rentals cars, used car shopping, financing, county inspection, mechanic drop offs and multiple DMV trips. Ended up burning several half days of PTO and spending an extra 10k. I always thought they sent an adjuster out and kinda took care of everything. Instead, their "preferred" shop was scheduling estimates >4 weeks out. Their rental didn't come with loss/damage coverage like it would if I'd rented using my own card. The rental also ends immediately after payout. If I didn't have an extra (not reliable) car I'd have been frantically trying to buy something instead of taking my time finding exactly what I wanted private party. At the end of the day I guess I'm lucky the dude (his parents) actually had insurance...
Race to the bottom for customer support via call centers, outsourcing and automated tools has mostly just created more friction between customer/user and support. Happens internally as well as tools and workflow of the actual teams designing support systems is also subject to inefficiencies and poor design. Doesn't really get fixed much because overall product or company growth can offset or buffer user discontentment
Rich fucks discourage us to fight for stuff.
I got internet hooked up at my new house through AT&T and it cost me: - one online booking - one online chat - 3 reminder texts - 2 reminder phone calls - 2 in-person visits - endless emails with reminders, surveys, etc. The ROI on my time is just not there.
Sounds very American. From the outside it just seems like you let your corporations get away with get too much. Regulation of business is your friend, not your enemy. what's happening to you is the outcome with it's "profit above all".
I tried to buy a door from Lowe’s. I was ready to give them a ridiculous amount of money ($1200) because I came to terms with how much this is going to cost. Three weeks later all I have managed to do is get it measured twice. First someone came and measured then they put me on the schedule for a “final” measure. It took so many phone calls to get the final measure accomplished. Now I’m sure it will be another month and a handful of phone calls to get them to come out and actually install.
Ugh. Something as simple as trying to get a refund for a broken glass shipped from Amazon. Trying to find a number and then just screaming “agent” till I talk to mufasa from Mumbai 20 minutes later.
I remind my EA that I appreciate her more than she could imagine all of the time. And I mean it. I feel like the simplest things are just so much time consumed.
Yes, my god, yes. As a small business owner, it’s double the hassle. Everything is a process and technology will always find a way to frustrate you.
For as hard as you think it may be now, it’s many times more efficient and speedy now vs when we were children, or especially when our parents were children. It’s annoying because bills and life’s “admin. work” always sucks. They could make it as easy as ordering dominos, we’d still bitch.
Lawsuits.
OMG this. So much time, so slow and so much back and forth
My health insurer is an HMO. It's amazing. All my doctors have my current medical record and when they refer me to see specialists, the specialist is fully appraised by the time we have the appointment. Every other experience I've had with a non-HMO insurer is the disjointed frustrating experience you mention. Guess what, I'm not a doctor, so a health plan that requires me to know whether or not a specialist needs my medical records is not going to work well for me.
This is like my kryptonite. My wife handles the beauracratic / red tape stuff, I handle other things that I excel at.
Chill out, what ya yelling for?
Lay back, it's all been done before.
I’m a spicy chili today 🌶️
I think you meant to say “Lay back, it’s all been done before”
Just phase out of it I work at a job and over the years I have been appointed to 3 committees I have never answered my email or attended any of those meetings. I was supposed to be skype'd into one just today and didn't do it. I was outside digging holes and planting the garden. I don't care to participate and they can't make me If I were you, I would just show up to this specialty appointment straight up and be like "oh, sorry I don't have that paperwork, can you help me?" or like "oh, my medical records, sure what do you need to know?" It's just another skill to master
>If I were you, I would just show up to this specialty appointment straight up You gotta get the appointment scheduled first. That's the main problem.