The Customer Service Industrial Complex
A Masterclass in Institutional Gaslighting
I’m on hold with Uber support right now. Actually, I’m not on hold, I’m on the phone with a human being who is reading from a script, apologizing profusely, and doing absolutely fucking nothing to solve my problem.
I can’t get a ride. That’s it. That’s the problem. Simple, right?
Thirty minutes later, I’ve been “understood,” “validated,” and assured that my “concern is being taken seriously” approximately eleventeen times. What I haven’t been given is a goddamn ride.
The Script
Here’s what every conversation with tech company customer service looks like:
You: “X isn’t working.”
CSR: “I completely understand your frustration, and I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.”
You: “Okay, but can you fix X?”
CSR: “I want to assure you that we take these matters very seriously. Let me look into this for you.”
[Typing sounds. Silence. More typing.]
CSR: “I’ve reviewed your account, and I can see that this has been a frustrating experience for you.”
You: “Yes. Can you fix it?”
CSR: “I’m going to escalate this to our specialized team who will be able to assist you further. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
You: “When will they contact me?”
CSR: “Within 24-48 hours. We truly appreciate your patience.”
[Narrator: They never contact you.]
The System Is Working Exactly As Designed
Here’s what people don’t understand: This isn’t broken. This is the business model.
Tech companies have run the numbers. They know that:
Most people give up. If you make customer service painful enough, 80% of customers will simply absorb the loss and move on. That’s pure profit.
Scripts are cheaper than solutions. Hiring people who can read and apologize costs pennies. Hiring people with actual authority and training costs dollars.
Offshore is even cheaper. Move the call center to the Philippines or India, pay $3/hour instead of $15/hour, add some “accent neutralization training,” and watch your support costs plummet.
Escalation is myth. There is no “specialized team.” There’s just another tier of script-readers, or more likely, your ticket goes into a queue that gets automatically closed after 72 hours of inactivity.
The CSR on the phone with you right now? They have exactly zero power. They can’t refund you. They can’t override the algorithm. They can’t make an exception. They can’t even really escalate, they can just fill out a form that creates a ticket that no one will ever read.
The Accent Thing
Let me address the elephant in the room, because I know I’m about to get called racist for this: I don’t give a shit what country you’re from. I give a shit that you’re reading a script in rehearsed, artificial English while pretending to help me.
The problem isn’t the accent. The problem is that I can hear the training. I can hear the phonetic coaching. I can hear someone who has been taught to say “I understand your frustration” in the exact same cadence, with the exact same emphasis, regardless of whether they actually understand or even speak English fluently enough to comprehend what I’m saying.
It’s uncanny valley customer service. It sounds like help but feels like talking to a very polite bot that just happens to need to breathe.
And it enrages me because I know why it sounds like that: because the company decided that the appearance of caring was cheaper than actual caring. They workshopped the script. They A/B tested the apologies. They trained people to sound empathetic without giving them any actual tools to be helpful.
The Real Scam
The genius of modern customer service is that it’s designed to make you feel like the asshole.
You start the call reasonable. By minute fifteen, you’re raising your voice. By minute thirty, you’re demanding a supervisor. By minute forty-five, you’re the screaming maniac who’s abusing a minimum-wage worker who’s just trying to do their job.
And technically? You are. The person on the phone didn’t create this system. They’re just surviving it. They get fired if their call times are too long. They get fired if they escalate too much. They get fired if their “customer satisfaction” scores drop because people like you are pissed that nothing got solved.
So you end the call feeling guilty and angry and helpless. Which is perfect, because guilty, angry, helpless customers don’t demand refunds or file complaints or blast the company on social media.
They just stop calling.
What We Lost
There used to be a thing called customer service that actually existed. You’d call a company, talk to someone who worked there, and they’d solve your problem because their job was solving problems.
My dad told me stories about calling Sears in the 1980s because our lawnmower broke, and they just... sent him a new part. No ticket number. No case escalation. No 48-hour response window. Just: “Yeah, that part fails sometimes. We’ll ship you a new one.”
That world is dead.
We killed it by demanding everything be cheaper and faster and more convenient. So companies optimized. They optimized for their convenience, not ours. They built systems where customer service isn’t a service, it’s a deterrent.
What You Can Actually Do
Because I’m not just here to vent. If you’re stuck in CSR hell, here’s what sometimes works:
1. Social media. Companies HATE public complaints. Tweet at them. Post on their Facebook. Make noise where other customers can see it.
2. Credit card dispute. If money’s involved, call your credit card company and dispute the charge. Let Visa fight them.
3. Find the executive contact list. Someone on Reddit with too much time on their hands has compiled the email addresses of actual executives at most major companies. Email them directly. Sometimes. Sometimes, it works.
4. Use the magic words. “I’d like to file a formal complaint” and “What’s your supervisor’s name?” sometimes trigger different protocols.
5. Document everything. Screenshots, case numbers, names, timestamps. If you have to escalate to legal action or regulatory complaints, you’ll need receipts.
6. Give up. Sometimes the fight costs more than the loss. They’re counting on this. They usually win. This is how.
The Bottom Line
Tech company customer service is not designed to help you. It’s designed to manage you. To tire you out. To make you go away. To protect the company from having to actually spend money solving the problems their products create.
Let’s be absolutely clear about who’s responsible:
The CSR reading you platitudes? NOT your enemy. They’re making $3/hour in Manila, getting fired if their call time is too long, with zero authority to actually help you. They’re a victim of this system too.
Your enemy is the Chief Operating Officer pulling down $8-12 million a year who designed this system. The executive who ran the numbers and decided that:
Frustrating 80% of customers into silence is more profitable than solving their problems
Offshoring to exploit wage disparities saves 70% on labor costs
Scripts and hollow platitudes are cheaper than empowered employees
Your time and dignity are worth less than their quarterly earnings report
These executives aren’t providing value. They’re extracting it. They’ve built a machine that exploits desperate workers in developing countries, abuses customers, and enriches no one except themselves. They provide zero benefit to humanity, just another vacation home and a better compensation package.
That call center worker didn’t design this nightmare. They’re just trying to survive it.
But the executive who approved it? They knew exactly what they were building. They saw the human cost in the spreadsheet and decided it was worth it. They’re making millions by making everyone else’s life measurably worse.
So don’t scream at the person on the phone. Cancel your subscription. Leave detailed, one star reviews everywhere. Tell everyone you know. Email the executives directly (yes, their addresses are online). Make them pay in reputation what they saved in support costs. Make them explain to their next board meeting why customer satisfaction is headed straight down the shitter.
Because that’s the only language they speak.
Humanity isn’t lost. Humanity is just being strip-mined by people who figured out they can optimize away the “caring about other humans” part and still extract profit. The executives who built this aren’t representatives of humanity, they’re parasites on it.
The real humans are the ones stuck on both ends of that phone call, equally powerless, equally frustrated, just trying to survive a system designed to fuck them both.
I still don’t have a fucking ride. 🖕