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Exactly. I've called it the "grief economy" Whomever can suffer the most grief wins. For example when trying to cancel a service the person on the other end is

Exactly. I've called it the "grief economy" Whomever can suffer the most grief wins. For example when trying to cancel a service the person on the other end is making at least minimum wage to waste your time for free. They can easily suffer more grief than you and so they have little to no reason to try and solve your issue quickly or at all. I've seen so many of these games since coming to the US. It's setup for whomever can suffer the most will get a good price, the customer service, or other kinds of "privileges" considered just normal decency in other countries. The only solution I've found is to interact and depend as little as possible on others. They're pretty unlikely to come through for you if needed.

tdeck 5y ago
"Whoever can suffer the most grief wins" also seems like an apt description of what it's like to participate in a representative democracy's political process.
newsbinator 5y ago
Often they're measured on time to complete a call/ticket and they're not allowed to hang up on the customer, so in cases when I need to get something done, I insist that I have all the time in the world. You can keep me on hold for the 3 to 6 hours this will take, I don't mind. Just keep me on hold and I'll wait patiently, Yes, I do have all day. They'll cajole me to hang up, say that I'll get a call back, etc, but I insist that they can keep me on hold while we wait for whoever to finish their lunch break or get back from their meeting. Often the issue gets resolved in 10 minutes this way. And surprisingly: it stays resolved with no worse success rate than playing call back tag. If it's actually taking a long time (which doesn't happen often), then I hang up and try a new rep or a new support channel.