Comment by rougka
5 months ago
I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought.
It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.
Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat
I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario
The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.
Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional
Germany is somewhat rubbish.
I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing.
Syncing the app with the train station? Somebody else's problem.
In half an hour there should be a replacement bus for another cancelled train. There are no signs in the app or the station that indicate where that bus is to be found. You just need to know.
Putting sings for replacement buses due to degraded service that's long planned and already happening for 2 months? Somebody else's problem.
An old man asks if the bus will allow to catch the train connection at its destination. The bus driver bitches at him for asking that question -- not his job. Somebody else's problem.
Training the bus driver that, being an official replacement of a train, he needs to know that, clearly also somebody else's problem than that of the German Railways.
It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
The bus is ice cold for an hour. When am old lady gets off and tells the bus driver that it was freezing all journey, he asks "well what can you do". Bewildered she answers "turn on the heating"? He didn't expect that. He seemed to think that everything except driving was somebody else's problem.
This is just one night's bus journey story. I also got my SIM card deleted and a parcel was lost in the subsequent week. Documenting here the amounts of "somebody else's problem" I encountered in their customer support hotlines is somebody else's problem for me for now.
There is some degree of accountability for DB: Other organizations like Swiss and Austrian railways stopped taking schedules of DB seriously and stopped waiting or booking through.
I used to work with German people (I’m Finnish) and despite being pleasant people, simple things took a long time. It was always something to do with the responsible person not being available, perhaps on holiday or sick leave, and it wasn’t possible for anyone else to take over their responsibilities.
I got the feeling that papers were being pushed around from desk to desk until a vacant desk came along and progress stalled.
In the same job, I worked with Americans. Very nice people and super easy to get along with. Always friendly and with a healthy sense of humor. A certain lightness of heart was always present even when dealing with urgent or negative matters. Only thing was that they made a lot of mistakes that often didn’t seem accidental — I saw a bit of negligence, along the lines of “if someone took just one look at this, they’d be able to tell in seconds what’s wrong”.
> It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
I have experienced this many times. Thankfully the bus drivers here in Hungary are pretty helpful (well, in my county at least), and worst case: you ask other passengers who also happen to be friendly. When it is pitch black outside and the windows are opaque due to moisture, it is not only your problem, but everyone else's, and people often find a way to cooperate and work together.
And the root of all that? Privatization.
The German mail rail and track operator (Deutsche Bahn) isn't private but 100% state owned (and control sits with the federal government). They wanted to privatize it a couple of decades ago but abandoned it. There is still some hybridization between supposedly it being a business and also a public service left in the law, though.
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Given how good the rail systems are in several Asian cities despite/thanks to being private, you might want to reconsider that opinion.
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No, it's not. It's bureacracy, and it exists in every big organisation, private or public. I'd actually suggest that public sector bodies are often worse for this.
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Exactly.
Being a bus driver used to be a decent job for semi-retired construction workers, and such.
But then privatization hit, and over the last 20 years, there is no niceness left. They're even trained to disregard customers, and penalized otherwise. It's insanely inhumane.
And the causal effect is very clear, there can be no doubt about it. It's not the bus driver's fault.
> the root of all that? Privatization
Honesty, it's German politics doing precisely this that's part of the problem: flippant diagnoses too broadly applied from afar.
Really?
The more focused a company is (the more reliant it is on its core service) the more accountable it can be. I'd argue many companies are if anything more accountable than the government. It doesn't have to be true, but I'd argue it often is.
Communism is the answer!
I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to track it down.
That’s a sad experience and I would definitely try to chase them robots. Sadly even though German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality, though when it comes to human service you can find yourself in peculiar position. And particularly if you are not German and happen to be in one of those international cities there where Germans are fed up with visitor. You waive goodbye to your 50€ and keep a story to tell, that’s all.
Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.
>German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality
Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently. They are not as quick to work their smartphone, and the ticket machines are being removed everywhere to be replaced by apps that are much cheaper to run. This works fine for the younger generations, but older and less tech-savvy people are getting left behind.
Quality though, no way. Every single time I tried to give ÖPNV a chance in the last 3-4 years I was either different degrees of late or didn't arrive at all without switching to some alternative method of transport on the way. Doesn't even matter if I tried local routes (Frankfurt and Darmstadt) or longer inter-city connections to Munich or Leipzig, it's all completely broken. People in my company routinely book connections several hours earlier than they need to be places to have a chance of arriving in time, and often are still late. Trains are overbooked, connections are late or often cancelled altogether, seat reservarions don't work more often than they do, WiFi on the trains never works... Many, many things have to change for me to reconsider my default of taking the car everywhere, and I don't think they will in any sort of a relevant timeline.
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It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.
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>my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era
after the Butlerian Jihad.
> german public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality
You have something mixed up there.
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> The person who answered couldn’t speak English.
It sounds like this was the main point of failure. I’m not sure it can be considered an error in the system. I’d consider the risk inherent in traveling in a country without knowing its language.
Germany is the only country in which I’ve had 112 (emergency services) hang up on me because they couldn’t speak English.
It’s worse than France in this regard.
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In Europe in 2024, it is totally unreasonable to expect every visitor to speak the local language at a high enough level. Yes, your language is big and important, but we can't all learn all of English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, which are the 5 biggest - alongside our native language.
The absolute arrogance of particularly French and German speakers is staggering. All of us from smaller countries and language spheres speak at least 2-3 languages, often more at a basic level, but they scoff at anyone who visits that didn't happen to learn theirs. Contrast this with Spanish and Italian speakers, where my experience is that they are often not great at English, but very much willing to try. To add, I've also never met an American who wasn't willing to do their best to help out.
When somebody is asking for help in a language you don't understand, your obligation as a human being is to do your best, if nothing else to help them find someone who does understand one of the likely several languages you have in common. Not everyone who speaks English at you thinks less of you because you aren't good at it, and everybody is just doing their best.
If I had been buying a ticket at a window from a human, there's no way I'd have handed over 50 EUR without someone understanding me. If fluency in the local language to the level that you can have a phone conversation (which is many times more difficult than face-to-face) is a prerequisite for visiting a country, you are either an impressive polyglot, or don't travel enough.
I had something similar happen to be on the tube in london. My ticket got demagnetised (combined intercity rail with travel card are/were still magnetic stripe tickets) and there were not staff at the station so I could not get the barrier open to leave.
There are supposed to be help points where you can call staff.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-undergroun...
Many businesses build walls around themselves like this.
Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people.
I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes.
What was annoying was the search auto-complete had many variations of "package not found says delivered"
Now, it is a little more filled out but still.
I've got an actual email address to a real business, but the humans* are struggling with the concept of "$company created the account with the wrong billing address, ignoring my agent who could have received it when my agent did contact $company, it's provably $company's fault that the bills were not received, so $company must tell me who this debt collector is and refund me for the late payment penalties and admit their own fault to the CRA".
* not that I could tell if they were LLMs
I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with.
I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"
First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?
So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. If things still aren't working, try our online support chat"
So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
Made me wonder if I should have switched.
> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
I had problems solved several times by rebooting modem. One time it was "reboot modem and access point in proper order", me naively rebooting them both at the same time didn't help, only phone support solved this problem.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer.
Hmm, I might be desensitivised from too much programming in erlang. It's implied that your program will encounter bugs or strange data and parts WILL be restarted, better account for that and plan on what to do on restart of each small part at the start of writing your program.
> So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
Because it's cheaper. Those who don't have support can offer lower prices. When people search for trinkets, they only have information about what is supported, there is no good information about quality of device and support, high price also not always means better support. SO they just go for lower price and hope not to suffer too much.
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>If things still aren't working, try our online support chat
>So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all.
I wish everything had support chat. IMO it's much less hassle than having to call. It's usually trivial to get through the first layer of automated support and get a human on the line.
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Why did you switch? Can't have been their reputation for support.
> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
Why is rebooting offensive to you? State is hard; resetting your system to know state can fix many issues.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40212967
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> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot.
This surprises me - as a programmer you should realise that reboots can often help. Cache invalidation is one of the notoriously hard CS problems and an awful lot of systems will start fresh on reboot.
> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)
My current ISP is better, but my previous ISP cycled IP addresses at 2am (and lost connectivity for about 30 seconds at the same time) on a Friday night. I would semi-frequently be up playing games at that hour, and it was about 50/50 as to whether devices on my network would survive the blip. Rebooting the router had a 100% success rate.
I currently (unfortunately) have a google wifi mesh system. It works great, except about once a month it reports that absolutely everything is fine, all tests pass from my mobile device, but my laptop has no internet connectivity. Rebooting fixes it just fine.
> How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out?
Firmware is still software, like it or lump it. Modem firmware has been shitty for a long time. A major ISP [0] in the UK had an issue with their firmware that caused massive latency spikes under load. Alsom Power loss happens sometimes. The modem/router has to be able to turn on in the first place, so a "reboot" is just going through that process again. It's attempting to return to a "last known good".
[0] https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Hub-3-Com...
I've started just sending physical, paper, letters if I need to communicate with a company. It seems to have a better success rate.
At this point everyone needs to get in the habit of using small claims court. You can often do it online in a few minutes these days.
Make a good faith effort to get your problem addressed, and record the fact that you've done so to use in your hearing if it gets that far. Then just file the claim. Generally they fold immediately, and this way you incentivize actual customer service in the only language they understand.
>At this point everyone needs to get in the habit of using small claims court. You can often do it online in a few minutes these days.
what country is this "small claims court" in? And are you sure this country's small claims works the way your country does?
Not every state allows you to file small claims against people outside the state, FYI.
What claim would there have to be to file on the scenario outlined?
Ah, I meant that post to be a reply to the ticket machine eating the 50 euro note.
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I do agree but also feel if people did this en masse, that system would get a rate limiter. After 2 claims per year you would be barred for being "vexatious"
Being realistic, if you have these sorts of issues more than twice a year there's probably something wrong and you should fix that. Everyone has a few of those stories, but the only people who consistently have them are likely looking for trouble and picking fights.
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Only if the claims are illegitimate.
It’s a way to fully automate a Brazil scenario. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)]
Since at least in that scenario, there were humans in the Bureaucracy that could (but didn’t particularly) feel bad.
In this scenario, no humans need to be directly involved, which allows the scope and scale to be even more Dystopian.
Of all the various useless laws that keep getting enacted, one that guarantees that every company needs to have a phone number, manned by actual human(s) with organic intelligence, advertised prominently on their products/advertisements, never gets passed.
Because that would cost them money, instead of forcing people to find their own workarounds (or die).
Many parts of gov’t aren’t far off, and those are the really scary ones.
Germany has this law for commercial websites. Mostly it makes people afraid to have websites.
Brazil iz good. Becauz dirty dogz got plugged!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/mediaviewer/rm557755905...
Meow!
The experience is quite similar with DHL when you have a non-standard question. The chatbot is utterly useless and there is no way to contact a human being if you're not a business customer.
There is a way, but it is difficult. Most companies don't want you to call. Operators cost a ton of money. And what choice do you have really? Choose a different parcel service? All others are worse.
I can provide another POV to that story. We checked in as a family of four, and we're assigned seats in four different rows, with a two and a four year old. Only when entering the plane we had the possibility address this to a human and we were assigned new seats.
So this might be the reason you had to change seats.
they claimed they had to change planes though i had selected that seat when booking the flight, and there were no humans available to address such issues
Does Germany have a consumer protection agency? I might have complained there after the flight.
Norman talks about how systems need a way to veto or override the automatic decisions to be humane.
That book is now almost old enough to have a programming job.