and Spirit Halloween.

1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.

2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.

3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.

The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.

My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.

I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?

[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.

Unfortunately, that is exactly how you end up with legalese and laws that are hard for normal people to understand: because bad-faith actors will invent ambiguity, litigate definitions, and argue over the exact meaning of every word.

It's like trying to tell a child "No jumping on the bed!" and they keep doing it while insisting they're not jumping, they're hopping, and then go into a diatribe about the difference between jumping and hopping until you say something like "Do not jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, vault, stomp, rebound, or otherwise employ your feet, legs, knees, or body weight to produce repeated or excessive vertical motion upon, across, or within the boundaries of the bed."

And then they remove the mattress from the bed, put it on the floor, and start jumping on it, and say that wasn't against the rules because you only specified the bed, and declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.

These days, if you see a roller coaster train stopped on the lift hill, it's 10x more likely to be caused by the ride ops stopping the ride to confiscate a phone than for a breakdown [0].

A whole lotta wannabe influencers want to record a video of themselves on a ride.

[0] Also, most "breakdowns" on roller coasters are from the ride computer thinking something isn't quite right and stopping the ride as a precautionary measure. It's actually pretty uncommon for there to be an actual mechanical failure.

There's a non-drowsy anti-sickness formula out now called meclizine, but I found it to be less effective.

https://otolithlabs.com/vertigo/

This site has been up for several years though with no product being released, so I'm starting to question if it actually worked.

And what if the user is logged in from multiple devices, but only wants to log out from ONE of them? Your solution logs them out from all of them.

The entire point is that it is not possible to have authentication that is both: 1. stateless. 2. secure.

And so if authN is going to be stateful anyways, you might as well just use an opaque token in a database and eliminate all the complexities and foot-guns of JWTs.

Using /dev/tcp was also handy in getting that initial low-priv shell.

I wish I could understand the managers that insist on these patterns.

Are they completely out of touch and don't know that people hate them? Are they aware that people hate them but don't care? Or perhaps they've drank their own Kool-Aid so much that they truly believe nobody would actually want to say "No" and think they just need more opportunities to say Yes?

They also are interested in getting in and out as quickly as possible. They're not going to take the time to disassemble a computer to remove just the hard drive, they're gonna steal the entire computer.

> Maybe I should read about these actual crimes

You should, especially on the kidnapping front. The extreme majority of kidnappings are from a relative or someone the child knows who will run off with them during the day, not break in at night.

...

Not sure that actually will make you feel better, tbh.

If I can answer a question with a 30-second response to a Slack message, I will, and I won't mind it as long as it's not frequent. I won't join a call, and I'm only logged into Slack and Outlook on my phone, so if answering requires checking something on Confluence or Jira, I can't help.

Maybe I feel this way because actually being asked something is exceptionally rare. I'll be gone for a week and MAYBE I'll get one message.

The person you're replying to explained why they're not ramping up, and you replied "They are not ramping up", which seems awfully silly.

So I'll typically use a service like Google Flights to find a flight, pick an itinerary, but then go to the airline's web page to book the flight directly.

Same for hotels. Find a hotel on Expedia, then book with the hotel directly.

I've seen too many horror stories of people booking through a reseller, and if something goes wrong, the reseller tells you to talk to the hotel/airline while the hotel/airline tells you to talk to the reseller.

The absolute worst is someone that tries to brand themselves as a 10x engineer by constantly using programming terms like "dynamic programming", "polymorphism", "recursion" and the like, but they're really a 0.1x engineer because they don't truly understand what any of those are and when they should actually be using them, and so try to shoehorn them in when they don't need them while also not understanding them, and end up writing low-quality crap.

Took too long for management to get rid of that guy.

Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is.

I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's a shitty cell phone picture of the error.