This is very true. I used to work in a call centre for a large company which had all manor of silly policies. Since we were on the "front line" we were usually

This is very true. I used to work in a call centre for a large company which had all manor of silly policies. Since we were on the "front line" we were usually the ones informing the customers of these policies. We were usually given very limited information about the hows/whys of these policies so when the customers started getting annoyed and asking questions all we could reply with was "I don't know, that is just our policy" and "I don't have the authority to do that". Looking back on it I'm guessing we were kept in the dark on purpose since after a couple of minutes about 90% of the customers would just give up and accept it. Some asked to speak to a manager but of course we were instructed never to put a manager on the line and always to claim that the manager was unavailable or to just transfer the call to another agent who would give the same answer. If they had given us more information about these policies then we would have ended up spending hours in discussion with the customer which is of course what the call centre managers specifically didn't want.