Hello Bay Area beautiful nerds.
Join me Monday evening, November 3rd, at the Alamo Drafthouse in the Mission in San Francisco for a special screening of the brilliant documentary Drop Dead City, followed by a QA with me and the filmmakers.
If it sounds familiar.
Drop Dead City is the movie that Elliot and I covered a few weeks ago as part of our Power Broker series.
Now I don't do that many live events these days, so I hope you'll come hang out with me at the movies on Monday, November 3rd.
Tickets are cheap.
They're under $13.
Sign up for your seat using the event link in the show notes or on our website, 99pi.org.
This is 99% Invisible.
I'm Roman Mars.
Last summer, reporter Chris Collin left his apartment in San Francisco on a simple errand to pick up his dog Rosie, from his brother's house.
It was a sunny, beautiful Saturday afternoon as Chris drove down Bayshore Boulevard in his fairly new Ford Escape.
And I'm going about 40.
And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the car shuts off.
The steering locks up.
The power brakes die.
You can't do anything.
And, you know, there's not really emergency brakes like there used to be.
So I'm just like rocketing down Bayshore.
And up ahead I see the road sort of bend and there's like a little bit of a area where one would fly off.
I didn't know what to do.
I actually started like reaching for the handle, you know, the door handle.
Like, am I gonna do some like Lee Majors style stunt here?
Chris did not have to dive out of his moving car, thank God.
Instead of flying off the road, the compact SUV somehow miraculously drifted to a stop.
Obviously, the experience was pretty scary.
Chris also had no idea what had caused the malfunction.
And as he took the car from one mechanic to another and then another, he learned that they couldn't figure out the problem either.
But Chris wasn't really worried.
He had the confidence of a new car owner protected by a warranty.
He was sure that Ford would fix this quickly and he would get on with his life.
Easy.
So he reached out to the one place designed to help consumers like him with problems just like this the customer service department.
I call Ford headquarters and I'm like OK time to start talking about returning this car or whatever you do when it can't be fixed.
And that's when they tell me well, until we can replicate the problem, we can't make good on this warranty.
Again and again Chris called customer service, hoping to reach a human being who would understand his issue and help him solve it.
Instead, Chris's life descended into a months-long saga with customer care.
He describes this whole experience as, quote, a cretinous ordeal.
I'm just making these dumb, boring phone calls, waiting on hold, getting transferred, having to type in my zip code again, having to re-explain the problem again.
You know, increasingly I find that I'm getting disconnected, the call gets cut off or I get transferred back to the wrong person.
We have all been here, maybe with a car company or your internet provider or an airline.
You call a customer service line, you get routed and rerouted and then rerouted for hours.
The call gets dropped and after a few minutes of screaming into the void, you start the whole thing all over again.
Or you get a virtual assistant who, no matter how many times you yell operator, will not connect you to a real person.
And then slowly, your will to fight starts to dissolve.
I started talking to people about it and what they all said to me is yeah oh, my God, I deal with this all the time and I just reach a point where I say f it.
I'm sorry to go purple on you Roman, but that is what they say and I really feel like that encapsulates something about what's happening today to us as a society.
You have this parking ticket that you don't want to contest anymore.
You have a claim that you can't argue about anymore.
And you just say, f*** it, I'll pay the $30.
I'll pay the $90.
And I started to see that we are living in a state of f*** it.
In the middle of his car ordeal, Chris also started to wonder if the headaches and frustrations we all face when we deal with customer service are all by design.
And it turns out...
Yeah, a lot of the times they are.
Recently I spoke with Chris about his latest story for The Atlantic, in which he writes about these kinds of obstacles in customer care that drive us all crazy.
There's even a name for them.
They're called sludge.
Sludge is...
Basically, the stuff that slows us down, it's friction, it's legalese, it's needless complexity.
It's all of these things that don't rise to the level of you know, a policy that tells you you can't have something.
It's subtler and more insidious than that. but it deters you from getting what you're owed.
And you write that sludge?
Is this term coined by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and Richard Haler, the economist?
And this is the polar opposite of Nudge, which is their research about trying to get you to do things.
This is trying to get things shut down, I guess.
It's cavernous procedural stuff on forms and questionnaires.
It's the administrative hoops that you have to jump through to get basic things done.
And when it comes to customer service, it's stuff like endless wait times.
Exactly.
You can have perfectly good policy, but if folks are discouraged from getting whatever they're owed, then what's the point of the policy?
So you went about trying to identify the various tactics and companies and institutions used to create sludge, the secret art of sludge, so to speak.
And to do that, you talked to people in the customer service industry.
So who and what did you find that was enlightening for you?
Yeah, what I found was a guy.
His name is Amos Tanuma, and he sort of became my deep throat.
He has been working in the contact center industry or call centers, we sometimes call them For a couple decades.
He started out as a call center worker and he worked his way up to where he was setting them up, overseeing them, managing them around the world.
And he starts telling me the tricks that they have in these call centers.
And, unlike most people in this line of work, he was willing to pull back the curtain and talk about some of the dark secrets of the industry.
So let's get into those dark secrets that shape the design of modern customer service.
What are some of the components that you were sort of led through by Amas Tanuma?
Yeah.
So first of all obviously, when you need to call a company, you're not going to get through to a person right away.
You're going to wait on hold.
We are all familiar with the line, hold times are longer than expected, or however they phrased it.
So that is a form of sludge too, because companies could hire enough call center workers that we don't have to wait on hold as long, but they don't.
So that's step number one in creating sludge.
You're going to talk to someone who needs to hear every little bit about who you are, where you live, what your phone number is.
They're going to need to transfer you.
So it happens at that level, but it also happens above that.
It happens when you are the company and you choose where to locate your customer service.
I think we all probably remember that customer service got outsourced and then moved to usually to places outside the country where labor is cheaper.
And what Amas explained to me is that one aspect of sludge happens in that location because we have to make long distance calls to reach those call centers.
And there are more reliable ways of setting up those calls, I learned.
And then there are cheaper ways.
And those companies usually choose the cheaper ways.
So that's another kind of sludge.
Because the call quality is poor, you do get disconnected sometimes.
And so these are kind of more passive elements of Sludge's architecture.
Right.
So I want to ask you about the frontline of this customer service apparatus, the one that we deal with when we sort of encounter sludge.
And that's the customer service rep.
You spoke with Amas and others about these frontline people.
Can you just talk about what that role is and how hard it is on them actually to deal with this?
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because, as frustrated as we get with the person on the other end of the call, it is a really really hard and pretty joyless job, as far as I can understand it.
And what they describe is more like a factory floor than an office job.
Every aspect of their work is measured.
There are all these penalties.
If they escalate a call too many times, if they solve too many problems, if they give away too many credits, which is a term of the industry.
So Yeah, it's very easy to get frustrated with them, especially when they are talking in this kind of inhuman corporate language.
But I think it's a job that puts them in a really impossible spot where basically, they're not trying to serve the customer.
And a big part of Sledge and this is what I heard from call center workers that I talked to a big part of Sledge is having that personness, that humanity trained out of you.
Amos Tanuma said they're training you into being an algorithm.
Because people are naturally empathetic.
And as Amos told me, that doesn't serve the bottom line.
They have to train that out of you very quickly.
Otherwise, those call center workers are just going to be giving away what you're entitled to, and that doesn't help them.
And one thing that kind of encapsulates the problem with these call centers is something you mentioned about your own experience that I think we probably all experienced.
And that's dropped calls and getting disconnected when you get transferred and all these little you know accidents, if you will.
And you say, Amas, kind of explain what was really happening here.
Yeah, I start calling him and I'm like, Amos, is this really accidental?
Doesn't seem like it.
And he just laughs.
He's like, of course it's on purpose.
You know, there are all these tricks.
And one is these agents have something called an average handle time.
What's your average length of your phone call, basically?
They get penalized all the time.
I mean, going to the bathroom, they measure the length of how long they're away from their headsets.
So they are really afraid of getting penalized.
If their handle time starts creeping up, What's an easy way to bring your average down?
Hang up very quickly.
So that's one common thing.
So yeah, those hangups are often on purpose.
And is this the kind of thing where it's explicitly stated somewhere in company policy that like, a rep has to cut off a caller after five minutes?
Or is it just a corporation incentivizing various departments to cut corners and cut costs without any individuals actually conspiring?
It is hard to prove.
It's insidious.
It's subtle.
These organizations, the architecture of them is cellular.
So you know.
If you are the person answering the phone, you don't know what the order was from.
You know two notches above you.
You're just doing what's been asked of you.
So a lot of people aren't aware that they are perpetuating sludge.
At the top, I don't think they say, let's do bad service.
I think they just say, we need to bring these numbers to this place.
Please make that happen.
And that trickles down.
So it doesn't have to be all deliberate, but it's still happening.
And you know I always think about George Carlin line you don't need a formal conspiracy when interests align.
The interest is for us to give up and to walk away before we get what we're owed.
I love that George Carlin quote so much.
And it makes me wonder, like conspiracy or not, you know, for the companies that use sludge tactics on their customers, like hanging up on them, are there actual consequences?
Like, is there accountability?
Yeah.
So you have groups like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that's gone after Toyota, for Toyota set up this hotline to give you a refund on something.
And it was a dead end hotline.
You couldn't get through.
And ProPublica a couple years ago showed that Cigna had saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would go through the process of appeal.
Now, Cigna has since pushed back on that, I'm obliged to say.
But it's that kind of thing where they know that you are just going to give up.
Or they set up a hotline where you literally can't get through to a person because they're trying to get you to go online.
They want you to deal with their website rather than a person on the other end of the phone.
You would think that sludge is actually bad for business in the long run, that companies would worry about making things too sludgy and that would backfire and customers would just take their business elsewhere.
Could you talk about the gamble that companies are willing to take in making this calculation?
Yeah, that's a great question, and I wondered that throughout my saga.
Why is this helping them for me to be this frustrated?
Surely this is bad for business.
It pays off.
It's a calculation they're making.
Maybe it doesn't pay off in the long run, but...
These CEOs.
Their tenure is shorter than ever, so they are not going for the long-term health of their company.
They're going for short-term gains, just growing the company as fast as possible.
It's fascinating to me how the whole system has sort of evolved to lead to sludge.
Like a CEO's tenure is short maybe shorter than ever and they're paid more in stock prices than salary.
So their incentive is to save the company as much money as possible in the quarter that they're in and increase share prices fast.
So they want immediate results more than they're worried about keeping a long term customer satisfied because of that person.
Like they're not providing more shareholder value at all.
And you can then see how everything in the system leads to sludgy, frustrating experiences, the kind that we've all been through.
Yeah, no, that's totally right.
It's the incentive structure.
And so that means getting new customers rather than tending to the existing ones.
And we can see that.
We feel that.
It's really easy to sign up for a new service.
It's really easy to pay a company money.
You don't ever have to wait on hold to do that. those wheels are perfectly well greased.
The problem is when you have a problem as an existing customer.
So for those reasons, you start to see it trickle down into the call centers.
You know, they need to hit their numbers.
And when they don't do that, then that's when they have to start pulling whatever levers they have.
But it's also our fault.
That's something that my source, Amas Tanuma, pointed out.
He said, look, yes, sludge is out there.
It's insidious.
But we as consumers and customers have a responsibility too.
He said one of the most hated airlines in this country.
He named it.
I won't say it, but I think if you live in the United States of America you can probably figure out what it is.
People despise this airline and they get back on those planes every time as soon as the price is right.
So we are not disciplined consumers.
As Amos told me, if we want to have an impact, if we want to try and— move the needle in some way, we need to start by paying attention to who we support and who we don't.
I don't know.
I get that there's a part of the system that involves me, but to say like it's my responsibility to unhook myself from the system so that it breaks seems like a little disingenuous.
Definitely.
Like they put me here.
Like I was put here by them, not me.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
But I digress.
Okay.
I want to ask you about some of the more dangerous kinds of sludge.
I mean, you mentioned that you had to deal with your car problem, but you're a journalist.
You work at home a lot.
You have some free time.
You can navigate this a bit differently than other folks.
But there are things like changes to Medicaid which are introducing new sludge into the system, like having work requirements, which are this dark and cynical form of sludge.
Yeah.
And these roadblocks to crucial public services can have really harmful consequences.
Could you talk about the dangers of sludge when it comes to our society?
Yeah.
I mean, I had the privilege of fighting over something as small as a car.
I mean, it was annoying, but it was just a car.
There are people who are getting screwed out of insurance, out of SNAP benefits, out of All kinds of benefits they're entitled to and that have, like you say, real world, intense consequences.
And you see it all the time.
You see it in the big, beautiful bill.
There are benefits that we are entitled to and we are being prevented from accessing them.
And the consequences are huge.
It has to do with our health.
It has to do with whether our kids get the benefits or get food on the table.
Coming up.
We'll get into some of the weird history of sludge and talk about ways to survive the sludgiest parts of modern day customer service.
I'm back with Chris Collin and I want to talk a little bit about some of Sludge's weird past, because you discovered that Sludge has a quirky historical ancestor.
Yeah.
On my hold times.
When I was waiting there going crazy, I would, of course, play on my phone search for things on Google.
And I started reading this field manual for sabotage that was created in the early 40s, that our government made and distributed to citizens in Nazi-occupied Europe.
And it's an awesome document, one of the best documents our government has ever created.
And you can get it online.
It's very easy to find because it's been declassified.
And it's full of these dumb little ideas for how you can sabotage whoever's keeping you down.
In their case, the Nazis.
But it's not taking up arms.
It's weaponizing incompetence.
So lose your tools.
In meetings, bring up needless topics to discuss.
Give people the wrong directions, like make them go the long way.
So if you're in an occupied country, these are just all the things you can do as a citizen to just slow down the gears of the occupier.
Absolutely.
And as I read it, I was thinking, oh my God, this is what they are doing to us.
This is sludge in a nutshell.
It's all of these silly little ways to sort of slow us down and impede our progress.
So that's kind of the ghost of Sludge past, but I also wonder about the ghost of Sludge future.
So you're from San Francisco.
I drive through San Francisco all the time.
And all the billboards I see are about AI agents helping me through customer service.
But actually they're trying to sell AI agents to customers companies to help me through customer service.
How do you anticipate AI adding to or maybe taking away from the sludge?
I don't want to be too cynical out of the gate, but.
I was afraid you were going to ask this.
It's not going to be good.
Yeah, no.
AI is about to make things way, way worse.
Obviously, we encounter AI already when we call customer service, but they are about to dump much more on us.
And this actually goes back to COVID.
COVID, as you'll recall, had us all locked in.
We weren't going out, and so we had to do a lot more remote customer service.
And companies had to hire AI to field those calls.
And after the pandemic started to let up and companies could sort of reappraise their systems, they took a look and they asked customers basically, how was that for you?
And we all said the same thing.
That sucked.
That was terrible.
Please don't make us talk to AI anymore.
We don't like it.
It was unambiguous.
And what companies heard was, so you tolerated it?
So ever since then, they took away this kind of deranged lesson, which is that We may not like dealing with AI, but we're willing to suck it up.
And so ever since then, the race has been on to find new ways to bring AI to customer service.
And this is the ultimate dehumanization of the customer service system.
Because they're just reading your syllables and translating it to something and then putting phonemes back at you.
And it's not an actual conversation.
That's right.
And to be fair, there are things AI is good at, of course.
There are ways that it can solve problems more efficiently than human call center agents can do.
But by and large, it drives us crazy.
And that's a big part of sludge architecture is us going crazy.
I mean, I began doing like when I get it, you know, when I get like a sort of phone thing, I just began saying operator into the thing or hitting zero all the time.
Are there, like what are some guerrilla tactics of just getting through the sludge, if they still work at all?
I'm sorry to say those days are behind us.
It used to be that you could press zero or you could say operator or agent or speak unintelligibly and they would eventually connect you.
But they have gotten wise to that stuff.
They want to make you wait on hold as long as you can, so that eventually you get frustrated and then you use their web portal, which may or may not work.
Yeah.
So a few weeks ago, before my twins had to go to college, I had to get them their California Real ID.
And I sent in some of the proof of address and all the different forms ahead of time.
And we decided to go first thing when they opened in the morning so that we could get into the queue properly.
I didn't set an appointment.
We just went really early in the morning.
And when you go in, you get this kind of deli style number like D25 and G27.
And it doesn't go exactly in order.
Like, you know that your number is coming up because they have these different letters.
You know it's a little opaque and they have some room to make decisions on the fly based on, like I don't know how important your problem is with the DMV.
Yeah.
The point is, I was like struck by how things seemed different.
So fair and just transparent enough that no one gets upset about it because we're all moving forward in the system.
And I thought it was kind of this brilliant experience, like at the California DMV of all places like that used to be exhibit a of sludge and they seem to have really overcome this horrible reputation.
Yeah, I agree.
I think the DMV has gotten its act together.
I think they got tired of being the butt of jokes.
I suspect they did something called a sludge audit, which is what some folks who are battling the sludge phenomenon are calling for.
Just having this be a normal part of businesses and of government agencies, do a sludge audit.
Take a look at your systems and see, are they sludgy?
Can they be made more efficient?
Can they be made less opaque?
Yeah, I think that's an example of you know, doing it right.
So your article is really fun, because it's fun to find someone who is experiencing the same misery as you are, even though the subject of sludge is pretty dreary.
But one of the things in your article that made my heart leap was you describing Admin Night, which is sort of like Administrative Night.
And it's this thing that you came up with to deal with the sludge of the world.
Could you describe Admin Night?
Yes, thank you.
I love Admin Night.
I love talking about Admin Night.
I am now going to proselytize about it.
Please.
A few years ago I realized that among my friends there was this new genre of excuse popping up into our discourse about why you couldn't hang out on Thursday night, like a time when we'd normally go get a beer or whatever.
I started hearing from them and from myself.
You know, I'd love to, but I got to deal with this stupid insurance thing, or I've got to fill out this form for my kid's school, or I've got to catch up on bills or whatever.
It was all familiar, normal sort of domestic responsibilities, but there was just so much of it all of a sudden.
It felt like we were just overwhelmed in a new way, at a new level.
And I saw it kind of atomizing us.
So I fired off an email to a bunch of friends and neighbors and I said come over next Tuesday night, bring a six pack, bring a big pile of whatever paperwork has been weighing on you or whatever stupid bureaucratic thing you've got to deal with.
And we're going to do it together.
And so that became this thing that I call admin night.
So friends come over and we do admin together.
You talk for five minutes, you know chit, chat and then you put your heads down and you power through whatever stuff you've got to do for about 20 minutes.
You take a break, you hang out some more, have a drink, have some snacks, and you just do this for a couple hours.
And at the end we all go around the horn and each person names some dumb little thing that they checked off their list.
And we all cheer.
And it's awesome.
It sounds like a really nerdy thing.
It doesn't sound like the kind of party you might picture when you think of parties, but it's kind of cool.
I love it.
I love it.
It actually made me so hopeful amongst all of this that I was like, oh my God, maybe we could get this.
Admin Night.
If that came out of this, like your research into sludge, I mean, that would be just beautiful.
Thank you.
Because that's what it is.
It's like...
It's the doing it alone, feeling crazy.
It's also just like the energy to do stuff, just to respond to these things.
And just like, it's just like the fact, I mean, you're just, you're turning a sludge into nudge.
It's pretty great.
Yeah.
I also think part of the fun is just daylighting sludge.
By having a thing called Adminite, by acknowledging that we are all drowning in this stupid stuff.
That alone feels good.
That alone is worth something.
And it's part of the fight against it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let's let's close the loop on your Ford saga.
So what ended up happening after you, sort of like, hit their sludge and then had to navigate it for months on end?
I'll tell you what didn't happen.
I didn't turn into the guy I read about in Utah who got so frustrated with his car situation that he crashed his Subaru through the front door of a dealership.
I didn't do that.
I'm glad.
Pleased to say.
After I think it was a little over 100 days, but eventually I did talk to someone who began the process of buying back the car.
And ultimately, that's what happened.
They handed me a check.
I surrendered my broken car.
And then the crazy thing is they had told me they might resell it.
And suddenly I was in the grips of an ethical dilemma all over again.
Is this car going to get sold to someone else?
Are they going to disclose what's wrong with it?
I don't have a lot of faith that they will do so, given all the stuff I've seen up to this point.
And they couldn't really tell me.
But the article came out.
And since then, some readers have... taken it upon themselves to do some research.
I got the Atlantic to publish the VIN of my car in the article because I wanted.
I was so worried that you know, some poor schmuck is going to start driving this dumb car.
Uh, And someone looked up the VIN.
They found the car.
I think it's in Kansas.
I need to do a little more reporting.
But I think someone out there is now driving this car, and I hope that they got it fixed.
Wow.
So it's like operational in Kansas, not sitting on a lot somewhere.
Yeah. as far as I can tell at this point.
Wow.
Well, I'm sorry for your struggle on this whole thing, but I am very happy that you wrote about it and talked us through sludge, because just the act of identifying and putting words around this thing that we all feel is just this great public service that I appreciate.
And thanks so much for being on the show again and talking with me at a fun time.
No, I did too.
Thank you for having me.
Our executive producer is Kathy Tu.
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Kurt Kolstad is the digital director.
The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Leigh, Lashima Dawn, Jacob Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime and me, Roman Mars.
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