20 pointsby crescit_eundo3 hours ago2 comments
  • cwillu2 hours ago
    I hate how every support tool now has an additional “escape the llm” minigame at the start.
    • ddellacostaan hour ago
      Seriously. Ran into this with Tincan's support text line when I failed to receive the account initialization email to my provider...was immediately launched into LLM nonsense which I bailed out of until a few hours later when a real human finally texted me back. To add insult to injury, it turned out they couldn't figure out how to send emails to my small, obscure email provider, called 'fastmail' (/s) and insisted I use a different account. One failure after another with them.

      In a way I found it useful because it showed me right away that they aren't really a serious business and I was able to cancel our account before the free trial was over.

      (It also turns out that their base product is more or less a standard VoIP phone that is fairly easy to set up yourself for far cheaper...but I digress)

    • joe_mambaan hour ago
      Phone support robots had the same "escape the tree" game. You could usually bypass it and get to a human employee by spamming the zero 0 key.
      • jmhollaan hour ago
        Yea. A lot of them grew wise to this and just hung up on you. Some had no way to get through the tree to a real person. Or, the real person couldn't do anything (e.g., Public Storage).
      • tomjakubowskian hour ago
        CVS Pharmacy has started rolling out an "AI assistant" phone tree with no apparent way to get to a human.
        • joe_mambaan hour ago
          Maybe if you use a lot of profanities and threaten to cancel your subscription?
        • cucumber3732842an hour ago
          Their old school phone tree didn't either. You had to pretend to be irate.
          • shawn_w26 minutes ago
            Pretend? Oh, there's no pretending involved.
  • buildlogJohn2 hours ago
    [flagged]