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> You should prefer a world with credit cards and discount brokerages to one which doesn’t have them, even as you listen to hold music occasionally. The proble

• landedgentry 3y ago
  I am not really convinced of Patrick's framing of the supposedly inevitable trade-offs. I've lived in other countries with credit cards and discount brokerages, and in my opinion, the U.S. is uniquely bad at servicing customers.
• janus 3y ago
  It depends on where you live. In my country I would never take a call from a bank at face value and would always expect they give me a phone number to call back, and that better be an institutional number. Phone fraud is rampant.
  • bluGill 3y ago
    Which in turn depends on where you live: some places a call is not ended until both sides hang up. Fraudsters use that to call you, give you a number and then when you call back pretend to be answering the phone (complete with ring noises). If someone like a banks calls you, you need to call back from a different phone line, using a number that you look up before giving private information. Note that most of the time the above doesn't matter, as banks rarely need to call you to get private information. "did you buy X" isn't private - whoever is asking already knows you did: even if they are a scammer you have already lost - if you didn't you need to hang up and call the bank to arrange getting a new account now that your old one is compromised. The only other time that matters is why you know who will call and why (if you just applied for a mortgage you expect the loan officer to call but you also know exactly who that is)
    • someplaceguy 3y ago
      > some places a call is not ended until both sides hang up. Fraudsters use that to call you, give you a number and then when you call back pretend to be answering the phone (complete with ring noises). WTF? That's completely insane! Where is that? And please tell me that you can hang up the call if you reboot your phone, at the very least!
      • desas 3y ago
        It's a landline thing. It used to be the case on analogue lines in the UK that the caller controlled the connection (probably because they were the ones being billed for it and the recipients phone couldn't communicate it's time to stop the bill). That "feature" was copied into the digital world. Except now there's a very short timeout where after the recipient hangs up, the connection is terminated.
      • bluGill 3y ago
        It isn't completely insane. in the days of landlines it makes sense because you can hang up the phone and go to a different - more comfortable - room when you realize the conversation will take longer. I don't think cell phones have ever had this anywhere.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        I'm old enough to remember when the phone system in the US behaved this way.
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  > a system that calls you back is better than a system you wait on hold for But a lot of customers don't actually want that. An established connection feels safer than a promise of a future connection which may fail to happen for various reasons.
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    There is also no recourse when you never get called back. Better to just leave the call on hold until a human appears.
    • tomjakubowski 3y ago
      What is the recourse if nobody picks up the hold?
      • krallja 3y ago
        Or, as has happened more times than I can count, someone picks up and then the line goes dead?
        • bluGill 3y ago
          In both those cases you know something happened. If they never pick up - at least you know when you gave up. If they hang up you know and can restart. Both are bad, but better than wondering if you are forgotten.
  • notahacker 3y ago
    Or the waiting for an hour listening to hold music happens on your lunch break, whereas the callback inevitably takes place when you're in a meeting or driving...