Very good! Businesses always say they focus on the customer but part of that is also to allow the customer to get rid of them. I still remember the impossibility of cancelling AOL. I had to do chargebacks on my amex for a few months until they got the message.
I cancelled my Comcast service online. I DM'd @comcastcares on Twitter and they gave me no trouble whatsoever. I never spoke to a customer retention specialist or whatever they call those people these days.
I had no problem with the web-based chat either, though when he asked about setting up service at my new address, I said I was moving out of the country.
But still, I'd prefer to use a simple web form to cancel service rather than sit through a 15 minute chat session
As above: Use Twitter. It isn't session-based, so you can come and go from the conversation as you please, and it certainly didn't take me 15 minutes. :)
In my case, I was considering an alternative provider, I tweeted them to ask if they could match a competing offer, they made a different offer that wasn't good enough to keep me. I checked in another time with them on Twitter to confirm my contract was not in effect, which they confirmed. And then after my new service was installed, I informed them that their service had already been physically disconnected, and to please close out the account.
None of this came with muss or fuss, and I just hit up their DMs whenever it was convenient for me.
The key is to do it in person. Show up at an office, return the modem, receive a receipt, and report any future charges as fraud to your CC provider w/ the cancellation and equipment return receipts as proof.
I got calls from Comcast for weeks afterward telling me that I needed to return my equipment. I kept telling them that I did return the equipment and have a receipt. The only thing that made them stop calling is when I described the receipt to the person on the phone as having "that big stupid NBC peacock logo that you stole on the top of it."
I guess without the logo description, none of the other callers would believe me.
Businesses will likely comply to presert access to California customer business. They will build web frontends for proper account management (cancellation). And they will go out of their way to disable those frontends for non-CA customers, because they crave the money they are stealing.
It doesn't matter. Though, to be fair, most B2B sales aren't actually completed online. For example, if you deal with Salesforce, you complete the sale in an offline process. This law states that an online purchase should have an online cancellation. It doesn't apply to "tech" -- it applies to the sales process. So a guy selling you insurance over the phone -- they aren't required to allow online cancellation. However, if you purchased the product/subscription online, then you should be allowed to cancel online. Basically, the venue of the sale needs to be equivalent to the venue of the cancellation.
I recently had to cancel an ongoing subscription I had with Equifax, which requires you to call by phone. Unbelievably frustrating. I had to dial the service at least 10 times. Each time, the automated responder would make me go through a very slow menu selection process, only to randomly fail to acknowledge either my correct SSN or zipcode or street number, which I entered using a keypad. As a consumer, I've had to enter info via phone keypad for as long as I can remember, and I've never run into a system (not even small local businesses) that was so randomly buggy.
I thought maybe I had the wrong phone number for cancellation. Turns out, when you google "cancel Equifax phone number", there are several phone numbers listed by Equifax itself, on various sections of its "help" pages.
Took me about half an hour to finally reach a human operator. Surprisingly, the cancellation process was quick with her with no haggling. But I imagine the process is so frustrating overall that a good number of people just give up.
There's a thought. The evil of IVRs goes far beyond cancellations, though. Warranties, insurance claims, anything where the company "wins by default" admits labyrinthine IVRs as a dark pattern, and some of those are "interactive" enough that certified mail winds up introducing as much friction as the IVR itself.
>>> Please listen closely, our menu options have changed.
You are missing the "as". Please listen closely, as our menu options have changed. I know it by heart and can hear the same voice over and over again in my head. Crap!
I think what the parent poster meant is that there is a criminal element to wasting your customers' time on purpose in order to discourage them from, for example, cancelling a service.
There are laws around this in other areas, it's not unprecedented.
I just assume that they put this in regardless to get some amount of people to think "Oh well I better send an email instead...". Emails are cheaper to deal with.
And in emails they put in "We're experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of support requests and we encourage you to look at the FAQ instead".
> And in emails they put in "We're experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of support requests and we encourage you to look at the FAQ instead".
To be fair, you wouldn't believe the number of people that will send a request to support before looking at the FAQ when the item (and resolution) is in the FAQ.
As has been pointed out in past threads, the typical HN reader probably only calls on the phone when something has failed or is unavailable on the website, but from the point of view of the call center, most of their incoming calls are going to be people who refuse to use the website for things that could in principle be easily done there. So they are always trying to cut that fraction down or automate it.
Relatedly, I've been flying a lot more than usual in the last couple of months.
Every single flight, the boarding announcements start with something along the lines of "this plane is going to be more full than usual, so we're going to need to check some of your carry-ons".
Well guess what, United? Maybe if you didn't cram passengers into the fuselage like sardines in a goddamn tin can, you'd have enough room for everyone's carry-on luggage in the bins.
Even if most flights are not crowded, the distribution of people on flights is probably such that if your flight preferences are distributed in the same way that people are distributed among flights, you're more likely to be on full flights. For example, say flights either had 10 or 90 people on them, with equal probability, then 90 % of people are on flights that are "more full than usual."
I've learned that storage is rarely the issue - they do this to reduce boarding time to stay on schedule. I often board later in the line and there is still plenty of space. Really they should just ban carry-on rollers for non-elderly, able people, they're the ones people spend ages trying to jam in.
The most irritating automated response for me is "Did you know, you can also perform all of the self-service options on our website at www.<blahblah>.com that is b,l,a,h,b,l,a,h.com"
Half a year back I got a check from American Express for $50-ish because of some accounting issue they had. Bank error in your favor. Unfortunately, the local meth heads stole it out of my mailbox and I only got the check stub when someone found it in the street and turned it in to the post office. So I called them up to ask them to reissue the check. Long story short, they dodged and weaved with their phone automation and outsourced call center until I finally gave up and wrote them a letter. Six weeks passed and right when I'd written it off, I got a check.
Only reason you were refunded money was because they originally errored in their favor. You probably would’ve received nothing but a class action was threatened by private or government actor.
While I like the spirit of this law (rare for me with CA laws), I expect it to be ruled unconstitutional as attempting to regulate interstate commerce, whose so jurisdiction is under US Congress.
Not sure it would hold up in the Supreme Court. Provided the law is worded strictly to apply to CA citizens / only when corporations are serving CA citizens there is little to make an interstate regulation argument on. And there is also international precedence (EU GDPR) which could guide court opinion.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking but that's my $0.02.
It may well even be limited to businesses that have a presence in California; there are tons of precedents for crafting this kind of law to survive an interstate commerce challenge, even when the Internet is involved.
GDPR isn't a relevant precedent as there isn't a precedent -- GDPR hasn't been challenged in court, not the least, a US court.
GDPR also has no relevance for US interstate commerce.
South Dakota vs. Wayfair overturned the Quill decision, and, the Quill decision would have been the controlling precedent in any constitutional challenge, based on physical nexus. However, that all changed with Wayfair.
One of the key arguments in the overturn of Quill were that Quill created, rather than resolved market distortions. Essentially, Quill (according to the ruling in SD v Wayfair,) created a tax shelter for businesses that limit their physical presence in a state. The problem with Quill is that it disadvantaged economically identical actors for arbitrary reasons -- a small shop with a few items in a warehouse in a state would have to pay taxes on everything they sold in the state, while a large business (such as Wayfair) with no physical presence in the state would be advantaged by not having to charge a tax on the exact same items. Helping customers evade a lawful tax unfairly shifts an increased share of the taxes to those consumers who buy from competitors with a physical presence in the State.
"Quill’s physical presence rule has limited States’ ability to seek long-term prosperity and has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field."
So now, we look at the California law requiring online cancellations. It would be an extremely difficult argument to cite SD vs. Wayfair since the online cancellation requirement isn't creating a disadvantage on market participants or the states themselves. Lost economic development due to the imbalance created by Quill was cited repeatedly as a flaw in Quill. An online cancellation requirement is going to be very difficult to prove as having a deleterious effect on economic activity/growth/development as was clearly demonstrated in the majority opinion for Wayfair. Wayfair was essentially about tax shelters. The California law doesn't correct any particular economic harm.
However, that being said, any constitutional challenge to the California Law would likely fall short because the Supreme Court interpretation of the Commerce Clause essentially says that laws ought not present an "undue burden" on interstate trade. Allowing for online cancellation, would be, to say the least, a stretch to argue that it places an undue burden on doing business with people within the state. That's why, if this law were to go to court, it would be upheld since someone like the New York Times would have a hard time proving an "undue burden." Ironically (to me,) being required to collect sales tax in all 50 states as well as the thousands of individual jurisdictions (including multiple jurisdictions even within cities, thanks to economic reinvestment zones) -- that to me, seems like a massively undue burden. However, as the court rules in Wayfair, that burden is less important than the economic discrimination that was happening (i.e. a local online shop vs. an out of state online shop being burdened unequally despite selling the exact same product.)
As an aside, I might argue that a business without a physical presence in the state isn't availing themselves to the infrastructure or public services of that state, however they are being asked to pay for those infrastructure and services. Shipping companies actually do the deliveries and they, of course, are paying the taxes for their locality. But that's another debate. Incidentally, justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer joined Roberts's Wayfair dissent, in which he stated that Congress ought to be making the laws and not the courts. I never thought I'd agree with Kagan and Sotomayor on anything, but it is strange times in which we live.
In anyone's interested, Ginsburg, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Kennedy were in the majority on the Wayfair case while Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts and Kagan were in the dissent. gshulegaard↗
This is a very detailed response! I appreciate your attention detail, but I did want to address initial comment reading my comment as proposing GDPR as legal precedence.
I never intended to forward the notion that the GDPR would serve as precedence. Indeed in a judicial context "precedence" has a very specific meaning and a piece of legislature from an international body of government would not be considered legal precedence in a U.S. court. I chose the phrasing "guide court opinion" carefully to specifically avoid confusion with the legal meaning of the term.
I agree with your analysis of SD v. Wayfair in that this is not likely a piece of legislation that would make it to the Supreme Court on interstate commerce grounds (at least in a post-Quill world). But if it did I would speculate the argument would center around the need for online firms to alter their behavior in other States as a result of the California law. To which I made the leap to suggest that the GDPR, as a current event, and it's affect on altering firms behavior even outside of the EU would be something that would likely be referenced in a Court opinion. Although, if you wanted to find an example limited to the US, you could also refer to the current status of EPA car emission regulations to demonstrate a similar single state regulation altering firm behavior across state lines without running afoul of interstate commerce.
But at the end of the day you and I are in agreement, this would not have much of an interstate commerce leg to stand on.
P.S. For those interested in the South Dakota vs. Wayfair opinion here is a link:
Specifically, the legislative analysts working for the legislature who draft and edit proposed laws are generally very good. The wisdom of what is trying to be accomplished may be questionable, but the text of the law usually is defensible and accomplishes what it sets out to do.
For places that require a phone call I came up with a trick to cancel via email. If they reply back via email and say I have to call them, I tell them I'm deaf and can't talk on the phone.
I actually have a speech impairment (a stutter) and you’d think people would be willing to accommodate. I can speak just fine when I have complete agency over the words I choose to say, but it’s the absolute worst when I have to read out some long specific access code or account number and say it 100% correct. Stutter even once and they think I meant 2 P’s when I just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes this long drawn out process of “after AF6, it’s just a single P, but the rest of it is right” because I really don’t want to have to read out the entire code again.
But sadly there have been more times than I can count where I told them I have a speech impairment, it’s difficult for me to say certain things in the way they need me to right now, and I’d prefer to send them an email (even offer to send them an email for them to open while we are still talking)... And they said no they cannot do that for one reason or another.
When I lived in the US I would follow the phone menu for 30s or so, but at some point I would always a get annoyed enough and just hit random keys until the robot says: I don't understand let me connect you...
Often hitting # repeatedly did the trick. But lot always.
GetHuman has most companies' information online on how to get a human the fastest and alternate ways to contact them.
I learned the other day that the CA Franchise Tax Board has a live chat via GetHuman [0] which saved an insane amount of time on hold. I was originally just trying to find alternate dial in numbers to actually talk to a person, not a robot.
> When I lived in the US I would follow the phone menu for 30s or so, but at some point I would always a get annoyed enough and just hit random keys until the robot says: I don't understand let me connect you...
I don't remember which ones, but I've found several companies whose automated systems hang up on you after giving you a certain number of 'tries' to enter a menu option.
> Stutter once and they think you meant 2 P’s when you just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes this long drawn out process of “after AF6, it’s just a single P, but the rest of it is right” because you really don’t want to have to read out the entire code again
Have you tried using the NATO alphabet? I don't know if that would be easier or more difficult for you to say, but it's worth a shot, since it'd be less ambiguous over the phone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
Generally speaking people working in call centre, or that deal with client all day long, like the NATO alphabet, especially people that have to deal with random code, or need to get names spelled right. People that I know worked in call centre love it, and carry on using it decades after they left that job.
It seems a bit more tedious, but the slower pace with reduced ambiguity means you almost never have to repeat yourself.
My name has an unusual spelling, so I always have to spell it on the phone. I've had issues every time I try to use the NATO alphabet for this, because several of the phonetics are names. E.g. someone named Matt might say:
I am not familiar with NATO standards until I read this post. And I’m not an English native speaker. But what I get from NATO idea is take the first character from the word said in conversation. So when speaking with someone on the phone, sometimes I say “I” as Italy instead of India. And luckily they understand it.
You may try “Monaco” instead of “Mike”.
I overheard a co-worker once trying to spell out a mailing list address to a customer using a NATO-like alphabet, but he began, "M as in Mary, L as in Larry..."
We ribbed him pretty good for that. I even created my own Completely Useless Alphabet from that incident:
I can do the NATO alphabet when speaking to a human, that’s a good suggestion.
One thing though, when speaking to a robot, they’re not usually programmed for that. They want exact letters and numbers that their speech-to-text engine can convert. Eventually the robot takes me to a human after it fails enough times but there’s usually a queue, which isn’t always great because the wait times can be very long.
Have you tried text to speech dictation? macOS has this built into accessibility options under the speech category. You can assign a keyboard shortcut speak from highlighted text, simple as that. I use it to read faster cause I'm a slow reader.
I suggest creating a form letter where you threaten to file an ADA action against them, as well as notifying your state's attorney, etc. Plus cc: the local TV station consumer reporter. When they give you static, they get a copy of that letter sent to their registered corporate agent, return receipt. Their lawyer has to handle all such legal threats. ADA actions are extremely expensive for corporations.
People without an ADA issue should send their cancellation notice to the registered corporate agent, return receipt, which sets the date of cancellation and gets their (expensive) lawyer involved. Threaten to sue them under your deceptive trade practices statutes if they continue to bill your account. Lawyers shed these kind of nuisance things quickly and cut through the bureaucracy. Your file will be stamped "service terminated" posthaste. There is no better way to communicate your desire to terminate service than to notify their registered agent in writing.
How do you generally go about finding registered agents? It's never been super obvious to me that Sportsmans Guide is represented by "Clarke, Whitehall and Rosenstein, LLP" or some equally stuffy sounding law firm, much less where the firm might be reachable by registered mail...
Typically the Secretary of State for any given state maintains a registry of businesses that is searchable online. The main purpose for these databases is to verify the status of the Corp and to identify the Agent of Service. You need to know the name of the actual corporation to do the search. I say this because some businesses use a fictitious business name, also know as a DBA (doing business as) for branding purposes. In that case, you’ll need to find where the DBA is filed (maybe the County Registrar for a small company) and look up online or perhaps have to mail a request with a small fee, depending on how well funded the locality is.
This would probably be my go-to from now on when canceling a service. Kind of sucks to have to pay for registered mail but sounds like it’s a sure fire way to cut through the bs and maybe that’s worth the postage.
I’ve once signed up for a service and I didn’t know beforehand that their “delete account” button would take me to a page telling me that in order to shut it off I had to email them at least three business days in advance. I don’t have a general issue with having to inform people to shut things off the old fashioned way like via telephone or email.. but that’s for when I had to communicate over phone or email in order to begin the agreement. Such as with a consultant or contractor.. Not when they made signing up a quick and simple online process and then want to make it difficult to shut off so they can squeeze an extra payment out of you.
So I resorted to CC-ing a fake legal@ email address in the cancellation email, thinking maybe they would think I’ve CC-ed one of my lawyers (I didn’t have a personal lawyer, but they didn’t know that). They took care of it immediately.
The symptoms you describe are what someone I know experiences. In the same situation of making a phone call, he give the handset to his wife. What's pathetic is that the operator insists on talking to him "in person" even if he sits next to her. Some of these trained operators apply their company rules to the letter so much that it feels almost barbaric.
I don't. The only reason why this deception is necessary is because of the company's scummy cancellation policies. Heck, one could argue that it actually reduces labor costs because emails are usually less time consuming than phone calls.
This is a utility-maximizing lie. You're saving both yourself and the other person time. Unless you subscribe to some belief-system that holds truth-telling to be some sort of moral good in and of itself, everyone is better off.
And that's aside from the fact that the patter you'll hear trying to keep you paying is going to be full of, at the very least, deceptive statements lacking any objective truth or falsity.
As guilty as saying "I can only pay $X" or "$X is my final offer" when buying or selling a car despite knowing it's a negotiation tactic and not a real limitation.
An interesting question is whether a car dealer that says "we paid $Y for this car, we're losing money if we sell it to you at $X" is committing fraud if Y is a false figure aka negotiating tactic. I think a lot of people would be unsurprised that such a thing would happen, but should it be a crime?
I was reading a Matt Levine column in which he described some litigation over selling bonds that was very analogous to the car dealer situation. And apparently what happened is that it was decided that lying about the price paid was ok per se, but creating falsified documentation to back it up was fraud. Which seems weird!
Why? Its just a machine. You're trying to find the right buttons to press to get it to give you the desired results. The "person" is just part of the interface. They have no choice at all what to say.
If you saw that a soda machine always dispensed a Coke when you pressed the Dr. Pepper button would you feel bad pressing that button to get the Coke you wanted?
Despite what we teach small children, lying is not immoral. Lying is amoral. The circumstance and motivation of a lie determine whether that particular lie is moral or immoral.
There are times when it's moral to lie, other times when it's immoral to lie, and still other times when morality hardly has anything to do with it at all (such as the above scenario.) We tell small children that it's immoral to lie because we don't trust their moral judgement and would prefer they always tell us the truth.
Is it ever morally acceptable to tell a lie? Kant thought not. His example of the would-be murderer explains his reasoning. Read by Harry Shearer. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.
Thankfully most people have more sense than Kant. In truth, I doubt Kant himself would be so hardline if he were actually put to the test in such a scenario. Talk is cheap, would he actually be so depraved in practice? I can't rule it out, but I doubt it.
Kant's philosophy is universal, not individual. His morality (and many others!) accepts that people may becomes martyrs.
Should you kill a person to save two? Kill two to save one? Does matter who the people involved are? Anti-Kantian philosophies don't have good consistent answers to this -- at least they don't live according to their philosophical answers.
I don't think people grow out of the need to follow moral rules as much as you imply. Sooner or later, there comes a time when it is overwhelmingly in a person's interest to lie (or some other transgression). If they are purely rational, they will do it. If they think deeply about morality, they will rationalize why it is right to do what is in their interest. The point of inculcating honesty and other virtues is so one is habituated to the point that dishonesty is preempted when it really counts. Reasoned moral judgement is not an unmitigated good, because it opens the way for bias and hinders the operation of trust needed for relationships.
The way I see it, telling a "harmless" or "justified" lie can destroy trust, which can have substantial or even devastating consequences. Often one faces several choices, all of which may hurt people, and moral rules are a heuristic method by which people avoid the harmful effects of cognitive biases due to self-interest or logical errors.
None of this should suggest I think it's obviously wrong to lie to a stranger about whether you're deaf in order to avoid a conversation - that might be permissible according to generally accepted social rules. My point is more that when you start talking about deciding for yourself when to obey moral rules, you are on shaky ground, no matter how wise or logical you are.
> Lying isn't bad. Hurting people is bad. There are many totally honest ways of hurting someone.
While I agree with your first two sentences and think that they are well said, the third doesn't demonstrate the first; it demonstrates only that "hurting people can be done without lying", not "lying can be done without hurting people."
"Make game of that which makes as much of thee." They are playing you, manipulating you, and not dealing with you as a person. They are treating you like a factor to be optimized and played with. It is entirely a moral response to respond in kind and out-play them.
However, I get messages of this kind from them bitches:
Dear customer,
[insert the demand for something or a notification
of some annoying change]
Please call us at 1-800-xxxxxx
Please do not reply to this email. This email address is not monitored.
I've found a different method. Email them and tell them they need to call me or they won't be paid anymore. I've actually used the phrase "give me a holler". Got a call the next morning.
You've managed to bypass an automated system and jump the queue, but you're still in a point where you're waiting for their next action, potentially taking a call at a bad moment and then still having to fight the customer retention scripts and getting bounced around a call centre until somebody finally helps.
If your goal is to just end your contract (as permitted), I should not have to jump through any more hoops than telling them we're done.
Interesting. I had subscribed via Amazon for Kindle and did it automatically. I wonder if the same thing would be true if you bought your subscription through the app.
Perhaps not easy, but it is (a) online, (b) consistent from one app to the next, and (c) pretty much guaranteed to work correctly and work immediately.
Considering the sort of problems people are discussing in the wider thread, this is pretty idealistic.
Two years ago I lived in CA, tried to cancel, ended up submitting a ticket and was told I have to call for "security purposes".
If I didn't have anything better to do I would have loved to submit about 40 tickets a day asking to close my account until they finally did and banned me.
As with someone else's report about the LA Times: they say they don't, but you don't have to care what they say.
I did it this way. I went to their live help chat. The moment I said "cancel", I was redirected to another representative, who was clearly trained in customer retention. I held my ground (which is so much easier for me in chat than on a phone call!) and cancelled.
I had this issue with a water delivery service when I lived on the East Coast US. In the end I sent an email saying that I was moving back to Italy, stopping any further charges from them on my CC, blocking them by email, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted with my account.
I am surprised. I have a current subscription and my online account allows me to cancel. I also paid via PayPal so canceling the recurring payments would also cancel the subscription. Edit: looked it up and saw the link to cancel in Account->Subscription - https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/cancel .
This is exactly why I changed my payment method with them to a virtual credit card. When I want to stop my sub I'll just block the VCC via my online banking. There is no way I'm spending time and money calling internationally to unsubscribe.
Not only do they not allow you to cancel online, they autorenew your annual subscription to the tune of HUNDREDS of dollars. This happened to me and I'm certain I didn't explicitly opt-in to autorenewal, as I would never consciously opt-in to autorenewal of such a costly service. The told me the following: "by choosing to pay by credit card, you opted into autorenewal." !!??
I moved out out of the country, they autorenewed, I called them, and they refused to cancel the rest of my year's subscription! They insisted upon continuing to send papers to my old address for an entire year.
Completely scammy, I will never do business with them again.
Yes! This what excited me when 8 first heard about it and I was perplexed why people focused on reservations. That's just the door, and companies on the other end are interested in lowering the barrier for customers.
I'm curious what this does for in person issues, and if gyms will take a hit in CA.
Google has since changed this. Google Duplex will not "fool" humans any more. They announce that they're the "Google Assistant" calling on behalf of a customer.
I think unfortunately what will happen is that people will just hang up on the google assistant because it's not a real human.
It'll be kind of like what happened to the "glassholes". Maybe not as mean though.
> Because you want to make it difficult for customers to cancel.
Explain to me, in detail, how you arrived to this conclusion from my previous statement. If anything, a business accepting robocalls from customers would make canceling easier.
If I was a scummy business, sure but you're omitting the other side of the coin: making it easier for customers to do reservations. I still think that businesses would welcome robocall reservations (if they're reliable and efficient) just as they have the internet.
I don't think it would be a problem if a business explicitly indicated that robocalls on behalf of customers are acceptable. It's convenient for both businesses who don't want to invest in online booking systems, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle involved in making calls. Win win.
That's a good question. But we have to remember what happened with Google Glass.
Glassholes were inconsiderate google glass users that refused to take google glass off when interacting with people. Duplex will end up like Google Glass for a similar reason -- people will force other people to interact with robots.
I think if I'm a human on the phone more than a few minutes a day, I might take exception to that. Especially if more than a few calls come in that way and there are enough bugs in the system to make it annoying.
One particular countermeasure will be to require a credit card number (or some other personal information) for cancellation... which I'm not sure Google Duplex would be willing to hand out over the phone.
Let me clarify. The bank accepted a 7 figure wire transfer but I wasn't allowed to pay the full amount. I had to pay the leftover in person, even after I got the payoff statement.
I had one of those 80-10-10 mortgages and was trying to pay off the 2nd mortgage. Had to go in person, give them a check, and then had to HANDWRITE A LETTER to be sent to corporate (I think?) saying that "yes, I really would like to close out the account that held this mortgage". No template and a "sign here" or anything. They just gave me printer paper and a "just write something" attitude. It was a very odd experience as I wasn't sure how formal it was suppose to be.
Reminds me of this arcane tidbit: you can write your own checks...
> you can write a “negotiable instrument,” bank talk for a valid check, on just about anything. According to the Uniform Commercial Code, the body of law that governs these things, all you have to include are the name of the payee, the dollar amount, the name of your bank, your signature, the date, and some suitable words of conveyance, such as “pay to the order of.” You don’t need the account number or the bank ID number you find on preprinted checks.
Ring (the video doorbell) is exactly like this and I haven't gotten rid of my subscription because I keep forgetting and their hours are like 9 to 5pm. Hopefully this changes so that I can get rid of that crap.
Basically because of NAT. Because the devices on your network can't all have public IP addressed, you have to have them all connect to a central public server. Public servers cost money->ring costs money.
Of course the reason things are architected this way is so that more people can make money...
1. NAT provides a basic level of security for your network. The same could be achieved with a firewall, but it isnt the norm.
2. Even without nat, there would still have to be _some_ computer that does the processing on the raw data from the IoT device. There is no reason that couldnt be your PC or Phone, but the precedent has been set that these tasks are performed on a managed device in the "cloud".
3. The companies involved will make less money.
A better solution would be to have an IoT gateway device publicly accessible that proxies access to the individual IoT devices. This would create a better security story. If this device were standards based, then each IoT vendor could integrate with it, and router vendors could add the capability to their devices. Of course there is no financial incentive for things to work this way.
I guess I only bring up NAT because it is yet another example of the "server" lie. There is no such thing as a computer that is a "server". Programs act as servers. Computers might be "server-class", but all that means is that they are high quality. Driving a wedge between "servers" and normal PCs just pushes more control out of individual's hands.
1. It would be the norm with an IPv6 gateway. It's not like it takes anything special to replace NAT with a firewall: allow outbound, allow established/related inbound, and replace port forwarding in the UX with allow rules for (host, port).
2. No argument, does seem odd that it wouldn't be the app though. Figure a door bell wouldn't be all that intensive.
3. Yeah, recurring revenue is pretty much the gold standard.
A device that stands between your device and the public internet, provides security and access control, and is standards based... so a perimeter firewall? But with an API to allow internal devices to punch their own holes. Ehh don't get me wrong I like the spirit, but that would immediately get used by malware.
And interestingly "9 to 5pm" CENTRAL time. So here is my theory. Most service calls for the same company will be 24/7 out of India, Philippines, etc, where cost is low but ROI is good. Then cancellation done in the USA at "normal" biz hours to make it a real PITA.
This would have been a welcome change when I tried to break my marriage with Verizon. 3 phone calls later and 2 months passed they were still charging me for the my cell phone service and it took repetitive attempts to straighten things up. Bastards!
I canceled my LA Times subscription online last week. The website says you have to call to cancel. I thought I'd just give it a try online, fully expecting to fail, but to my surprise it all went through easily. They asked for the reason, and when I gave it (excessive ads+tracking) they canceled.
I canceled my local newspaper subscription (had to repeat "cancel the account" a dozen times whenever the CSR started speaking until they figured it out), subscribed through Google Play, and took 2/3 off the monthly cost.
My bank allows me to cancel my credit card online, which is good enough for me.
I tried to cancel a credit card in order to escape a recurring charge I couldn't cancel. I was informed by Chase that because I had a previous auto-bill relationship with that company, its charges would follow me to my new card, and if necessary, my bank accounts.
I am fairly certain that it isn't generally illegal to lie to people. Maybe a little shitty, but isn't it shitty to not let people unsubscribe from a service in the same manner they signed up?
This isn't just lying though, it sounds closer to fraud to me (lying go receive services you otherwise wouldn't). It also sounds a bit like parking in the disabled section. And I don't know if there are legal ramifications for using services that are for the disabled but I wouldn't be surprised if there were.
Parking in a handicapped spot takes resources away from people who need it. This gets around an unethical business practice designed to charge money from people who no longer agree to receive services.
This is not a zero sum equation though. Responding to emails requires FEWER resources relative to having a service representative on a phone call. It creates a more efficient process, which is exactly why subscription based services don't want to do it. Friction in the cancellation process is desirable, because people won't put up with it and will stay with the service longer.
From- Someone who works in billing for a SaaS company.
It's not like that at all, because it encourages more services for people with disabilities, instead of taking them away. Every site should be more prepared to accommodate people who can't or don't want to talk on the phone.
> It's not like that at all, because it encourages more services for people with disabilities, instead of taking them away.
I mean you could argue the same for parking right? If everyone parked in the disabled section then you'd encourage having more such parking. And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.
In most cases (private parking lots) it isn't illegal to take a disabled parking space. The fines a private company levies against you don't have any merit (though of course they can refuse you entry and sue you for damages or whatever).
Parking spaces on public roads is a separate issue, and it's more in line with driving in a bus-only lane (technically illegal but it is because you need a particular permit -- so it requires more than just being disabled).
My point is that your are jumping the gun with discussions of legality here. The litmus test should be wheter it's shitty to lie about a disability in order to cut through reselling bullshit. Other commentors have more than adequately covered this topic though.
> And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.
Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
>> And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.
> Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
This was not the point of my comment. The point wasn't to sympathize with the company for their costs. The subjects of concern were other people with disabilities who may have otherwise been helped by the same representative (who probably also couldn't care about the company's costs either). The point of mentioning the costs was that the costs imply they can't just instantly add representatives to avoid affecting other such customers.
That is a poor analogy, because the service of car parking is already available to everyone.
A better analogy might be sidewalk ramps, which probably get used ten times more often for prams (strollers) than for wheelchairs. If they were absent or faulty, complaints by owners of prams can help grease the wheels of local government.
Sure, the service of cancellation is already available to everyone too. I also don't see how a sidewalk ramp is a better analogy since it's pretty obvious when someone needs to use it at the same time so that you can know you're not getting in their way. Over here you have no idea.
Car parks are a scarce resource. If I use a car space, I am monopolising the resource for the duration.
Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.
Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
> Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.
> Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
Wait, what? No, it's like the former. How do you know these agents handling your cancellation weren't assigned to handle similar cancellations from other deaf customers? How do you know the representatives don't have to go through extra procedures (such as documenting and obtaining authorizations for the non-standard cancellation, or bothering more reps to figure out whom to forward the inquiry to) that wouldn't take them far more time than it would take the phone agent? Meaning you could well be taking up a resource that was reserved for disabled folks, slowing down the responses for them in the process. Heck, even if the amount of time spent isn't any more than for a phone call, it's likely to be a separate set of agents handling these special requests than taking calls, meaning you'll still be slowing down this service for those who actually cannot use the phone.
What I find baffling is that neither you nor anybody else is making the most compelling counterargument I can see here, which is that cancellations aren't time-sensitive, so a slower reply would be unlikely to do anyone much harm as a result of slow service. Meaning it's one way you could argue disabled people are not suffering any tangible harm from slow replies. But to argue that it doesn't even affect the service provided to them in the first place is bizarre, especially if you think about what would happen if tomorrow everybody decided to follow this advice and do the same thing.
I see the misunderstanding. You're assuming that cancellations would still be handled by humans shuffling paperwork, whereas I'm optimistically assuming cancellation would be handled by computer software, much like it is when you cancel an exclusively online service like Netflix.
Though even in your scenario, you are assuming that a company wouldn't adjust its resources as telephone usage drops and written submissions increases. And yes, the point you make in your second paragraph also applies—a written cancellation request places the time onus on the company rather than the customer.
But either way, it is always a good thing if the methods used by people with disabilities are mainstreamed rather than treated as oddball special exceptions.
Or walking up a sidewalk ramp, or using the headphone jack at the ATM, or using the handicapped stall in the bathroom, or taking the elevator instead of the stairs...
If you use the handicap stall in the bathroom because you like the extra space, and then handicapped person comes in who actually needs the rails, and can’t use them, isn’t that a bad thing?
Not really. Handicap bathroom stalls are never handicap exclusive. Sometimes there isn't even a second, non handicap stall.
It isn't like parking, because 99.9% of the time, it's in and out in a couple minutes, and 100% of the time you are physically present in the stall.
But if you take the only parking spot, that person pretty much has to go home. The car could be there for hours, even the whole day. Versus two minutes.
This huge moral difference is accurately reflected in the law- it is absolutely, perfectly legal to use a handicap stall without a disability.
So I didn't downarrow you, but I think I can explain why you have been. You are conflating morality with law. Law can be amoral, and illegal actions can be moral.
Weird, because I thought everything I said was about the legality aspect, at least until other people suddenly started bringing ethics and morality into the discussion. Am I wrong about this?
Bringing up such a minor illegality implies you care about the morality of it. If somebody was speeding and I said “hey, you know speeding is illegal right?” they would rightfully think I have some sort of weird moral problem with speeding.
> Bringing up such a minor illegality implies you care about the morality of it. If somebody was speeding and I said “hey, you know speeding is illegal right?” they would rightfully think I have some sort of weird moral problem with speeding.
Huh... that's actually very much the opposite of how I would interpret that sentence, but okay.
Maybe this is presumptive of me, but you should consider not just the the words you say, but also their implication. Most other people will, and if you don't you can't communicate effectively.
I thought we just concluded that the problem is that we come to different conclusions about what the implications actually are, not that I didn't consider the implications?
When someone asks me if I know something is illegal, to me, it seems they are being quite explicit that they are talking about legality and not morality, since otherwise they could tell me that that something is not cool, not that it's not legal. To me this is obvious, but maybe everyone else finds this strange and this is evidence that I just think weirdly, I don't know. But either way it's certainly not that I don't try to think in the first place.
I really don't understand why people are still down arrowing you. You seem like a reasonable and polite person, there should be room for you to comment here without getting piled on.
Re the topic at hand. I think that people view this as at most trivially illegal. By bringing up the question, people are in some way assuming that you are against the new CA law. Not saying that you said that explicitly, but I think that is what is going on.
Even though it is a lie, it is a lie that is for the greater good. Maybe the company will realize how much time their call center employees are wasting filling out cancellation forms for the deaf and instead just make the form available online. They might lose some customers that might have stayed had a retention agent gave them free HBO for the month but there might be less time wasted on the phones with customers threatening to leave in exchange for free HBO. Either way, only people serious about leaving will leave and the call center will have less call volume and save the company money. In many areas, Comcast is the monopoly. You either have your TV or internet from them or you have nothing. If customers want to leave, then Comcast needs to react to the market and figure out what they are doing wrong.
For example: closed captioning on multiple TVs or in loud rooms; curb cuts for people pushing strollers, walking bicycles, using walkers, or pushing shopping carts. Not the intended purpose, but making things more accessible made them more better for everyone.
I'm not super up on the history of computer dictation and voice control but I'm pretty sure some of that was driven for use by people with mobility limits that kept them from using a keyboard and mouse. Now we all have voice controlled virtual assistants.
Since when was the ability to cancel something online meant for the disabled?
Either you or a loved one is disabled, and that's why you're so sensitive (if so, I cut you some slack). Otherwise, I have no clue why you're throwing such a hiss about this. Many businesses (like cable companies) are being complete assholes by making it hard for you to cancel their service. Sometimes you have to lie and act unethically to get back at people like that. Hey, you wouldn't have to if they were ethical in the first place! They started this whole prisoner's dilemma! Me? I would love to cooperate and be honest all the time!
That excuse isn't going to fly when they get sued for not accommodating a disability. If anything, it'll cause a lawyer to pounce on the case like there's no tomorrow.
This whole thread is about companies that don't support self-serve cancellation and require you to call in, so the "scammers" here would very much care considering it's companies like Comcast and the like.
Not going to comment on whether I have loved ones who are disabled since its really nobody's business here and I don't need anybody "slack", but in any case, I wasn't "throwing such a hiss about this" -- I was asking if it was legal, and if you actually read the rest of my comments, you'll see I explicitly acknowledged that the other side's practice is scummy and that lying to 'get back at people' seems like potentially the most legitimate argument people are making here. Everyone else seems to be raging over this rather than me, so it's weird to give me the credit for it. The companies' practice angers me too; it's not like I'm on their side. But if I'm providing an outlet for everyone's anger then I guess I'm... glad to be of service?
I did think about this, but I don't really think I'm taking anything away from the actually deaf.
It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request.
I agree that it does feel a slight bit scummy, but after thinking about it I decided that I was OK with it. I can see how some others might think differently though.
Finally! It's nice to see an attempt at a level-headed response, and from the person it was actually directed to (and that you had actually put thought into this). Funny enough, though, no one's actually answered the question I actually asked, which I still have... which is whether this is legal?
No, it's not illegal. First, under the ADA they can't actually ask you to verify any disabilities: that's between you and your doctor. Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one. I've been to too many concerts over the years, and while no doctor has diagnosed me, I can truthfully say I have a hard time understanding people over bad phone connections.
> First, under the ADA they can't actually ask you to verify any disabilities: that's between you and your doctor.
Wow, that's interesting. They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)? How does that work for companies that give discounts (say) to the disabled? Can everybody lie to get them legally then? This doesn't sound right. (Note that it doesn't have to necessarily be the ADA outlawing this, so I wouldn't just rely on that.)
> Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one.
Do you mean to have one medically or legally? The former is obvious to me but the latter isn't.
> They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)?
That's correct, generally. I mean, if you show up at an airport with an oxygen take, be prepared to demonstrate that you medically require it. It's also different for employment, where your boss may ask you to provide evidence that you need a special accommodation to do your job.
The ADA also covers cases where there's a record of you having a disability - even if the record is wrong! - or where you have been perceived to have a disability. Not only cases where you really do.
Side note: If you look at the ADA language about service animals, it's all about what you as a business cannot do, without doing a good job of specifying what constitutes a service animal... So if abusing vaugely defined legislation aimed at protecting people with disabilities is your thing, $50 on Amazon and you can take your pets just about anywhere ;-)
What right do they have to know what your disability is?
The ADA has exemptions for when it would be unsafe or unreasonable to provide accommodation, and those are the only places where anyone can discriminate against someone for whatever their condition might be (eg the vision and prescription requirements for pilots). In fact the ADA explicitly disallows asking for any general information about disabilities - an employer can only ask yes/no questions about specific criteria.
I can’t imagine what their argument for not supporting someone cancelling their subscription would be.
Fun question: if you were to say you were cancelling for medical reasons would they be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if the call center asked what it was?
Why would it be illegal? Unless it's written in to a law as something you can't do, it's by-default legal; and why would someone write a law saying that you couldn't pretend to be deaf?
Generally speaking, it's unlawful to make false representations in the course of doing business. There doesn't necessarily need to be a specific law that says "you can't pretend to be deaf", because if you misrepresent such facts, you are very likely exposing a lot of legal attack surface.
> Generally speaking, it's unlawful to make false representations in the course of doing business
You basically described the whole field of advertising, if you make misrepresenting facts illegals, there's not a lot of businesses that would not be fined.
There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal. Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].
That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.
But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.
[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.
> There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal.
I agree, but at the same time you probably wouldn't be interested in saying most of these lies, so it's difficult to use that as a basis for assuming the legality of the ones we might be interested in.
> Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].
This is where I'm stuck. Fraud seems to have a wider scope than money (the obvious counterexample being if you're giving someone something other money, it can still result in fraud). What I'm unclear on is how wide the scope gets. Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages? I don't know what the answer is (which is why I asked), and it seems to me that it could go either way.
> Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages
IANAL, to be clear. But yes, fraud is generally defined legally as deception for "gain", which is usually, but not always, denominated in money.
Beyond that, like everything else in law, it gets complicated. Are you asking about civil or criminal fraud? Where?
Also, even if you have a case that is technically civil fraud (say, I tricked you out of a dollar) or criminal fraud (I overstated my income on a mortgage application by a dollar), for small-dollar amounts you'll find you have a lot of difficulty actually bringing a case/no DA will touch it, simply because it is too small to waste court time on.
Incidentally, that final point is why ATT and Comcast want to kill class actions. If the people they cheat can't band together, it is too much trouble for anyone to recover that $2.74 "Up Yours Because We Can ILEC Infrastructure Recovery Fee".
dang, could I ask you to review and provide some feedback on your evaluation? I'm very confused at your comment. I was asking if the parent was in fact referring to lying, and if so, whether this was legal. This was a direct response to the parent comment's suggestion that consumers like us should lie on the phone. How is my comment off-topic when I was directly asking about the legality of the parent comment's advice? It seems to me that it was as on-topic as any comment on that suggestion could be.
I'm also confused at your flamewar comment. I saw that people were keen to challenge me on the morality aspect, but it was not what I was actually objecting to or taking the discussion on -- I was asking about the legality. If you look and see where the OP himself finally responded to my question [1], we had quite a nice discussion on that very topic that even got upvotes with no objections so far as I could see (but do let me know if you see otherwise). How this a flamewar, when we had a nice and civil conversation on the exact subject I inquired about?
Probably I just misread your intent. It seemed off-topic and the sort of accusatory nitpicking that users vent on each other when they're feeling flamey.
If that wasn't what you meant, I'm sorry I got it wrong! Moderation is guesswork. We try as hard as we can to guess right, but definitely still get it wrong sometimes.
Yeah, unfortunately not. I meant 100% literally what I wrote as you see there, which was figuring out if the advice to lie like this was actually legal (and I had to confirm they were actually suggesting to lie, since it wasn't clear to me and otherwise the question would've been moot). It was a naturally succinct question so I left it like that instead of trying to worry about actively dispelling anything else people might read into it, but I guess that was a bad idea. It's fine though, thank you for clarifying.
I did something similar when I moved to get rid of my wired phone service. I told AT&T I had signed a contract with Comcast and told Comcast I had signed a contract with AT&T.
I started doing this after I came back from living in Korea a couple of times. The only one who ever tried was, I think, Sprint or another carrier, who offered to put a hold on my account but they could only do that for some short number of months, so of course my next reply was "I'm not planning on coming back."
I've done this several times with Comcast, but it failed with Time Warner when I moved out of NYC. They demand to know why you are canceling and have some sort of way to extract money out of you for every scenario, including moving out of their service area. In that case, they transfer you to another phone system that helps you find a provider at your new address and, presumably, nets them a referral fee of some kind. Meanwhile, if you try any excuse to quit that they haven't accounted for, they tell you "yes sir" and redirect your call to that service as a fallback catch-all. Truly despicable.
My dad used to use "I'm unemployed and have no money" on telemarketers, with some success.
Though nowadays, in the era of pervasive financing and Wall Street investors that care more about revenue than cash flow, I wonder if that would even work. Maybe "I'm being investigated by the Feds and all of my financial relationships are considered suspect, and so would prefer to have as few of them as possible"?
I've had people still try to sign me up when I've said this. I had just moved country, had no job, and was literally living off my credit card. I ended up getting stopped by some people on the street trying to sign me up for some charity, because I'm too nice to tell them to fuck off.
Even after I explained that I literally arrived in the country a week ago, and that I literally have no money, they were still trying to get me to sign up for a recurring donation. Sure, I understand that they get commission, so they want to make a sale. But not only is it extremely unethical to try and get unemployed people to sign up, it's also trying to extract blood from a stone.
Saying "I'm unemployed and have no money" will put you in the target market for certain products, like payday loans and diploma mills. Depending on the call center, you could find your contact info sold on to a new set of telemarketers. Win the battle, lose the war.
> My dad used to use "I'm unemployed and have no money" on telemarketers, with some success.
I've tried telling the truth, I've tried assertively stating I'm not interested, I've tried so many things...
...at this point, when I pick up a call, I wait for the other side to introduce themselves, and if they call with an unsolicited offer, I just hang up without saying anything. Am I a bad person?
Not at all. My current method is to block all numbers not in my contact list.. if they are important, they'll leave a voicemail. Works surprisingly well, actually.
Leaving out of the country is generally more effective than leaving the service area - the arrangements you're describing rarely cross international borders, certainly not within North America (EU might be different).
Comcast and SiriusXM are by far the worst I've ever come across. They demand explanations, try to cut you deals, claim they have to transfer you to their manager who attempts to up sale you. I seriously had to get one of my debit cards reissued in order to get charges to stop and to get my XM radio account closed out.
I just cancelled SiriusXM earlier this week. They asked why and I said I just don't listen to it enough. They offered a month of a different package free. I said no. And that was it.
It's my favorite answer, because it normally creates enough awkwardness on the call to make the other party want it over as quickly as possible.
And getting them on your side is always step 1.
Bonus points if they ask "I hope it's nothing we did" and you respond with an extra long pause and "I think it's best for everyone involved if we get this cancelled as quickly as possible."
I like having a bit of fun with cancellations once I catch on that they're not gonna make it easy.
"Please cancel my service"
"We'd like to retain your business is there anything we can do?"
"Is my service cancelled yet?"
"Why are you cancelling your service?"
"My service is still working, can you cancel it? Is this the cancellation department? Who will be cancelling my service?"
Just pretend like I didn't hear anything they said or asked and keep asking variations of that in an increasingly childlike wondrous tone. Sometimes you can hear the person on the other end getting audibly frustrated until they give in and cancel it just to get you off the phone-and when they finally go "Your service will be cancelled on this date, is there anything else I Can help you with?"
"NOPE THANKS!" and hang up.
Never fails to make me giggle madly. Is it patronizing? Sure. Do I care? No not really-I've asked nicely that I want my service cancelled. That really ought to be the start and end of it. Meeting retention rates is their problem, not mine.
Same thing with upselling at retail establishments. No I'm not a rewards member. No thanks I don't want to sign up. Yep I'm sure. Oh I'm quite aware that I can save 10% over $2500 spent. Hey can I just buy this pair of headphones and gtfo?
"Meeting retention rates is their problem, not mine."
Do you also maliciously fill out surveys with less than "excellent" ratings even after you are told that constitutes failure according to corporate management?
I understand the attitude of refusing to play the game, but that doesn't justify making things worse for other victims.
> Do you also maliciously fill out surveys with less than "excellent" ratings
I've started doing this, although I wouldn't characterize it as malicious. I bought a car last fall and that started a ridiculous number of surveys coming my way. I contacted the dealership, the manufacturer, and the survey company asking for the surveys to stop. The dealer and manufacturer both responded saying they would take car of it. The survey company never responded.
The surveys keep coming so I fill them out randomly and return them. It isn't malicious because I'm genuinely dissatisfied with them because they can't stop the surveys.
It seems ironic to me that I've bought multiple cars from a dealership and I can't get them to update my email or postal address after well over a year. They apparently don't want to send me ads.
I know exactly what you are talking about. When my wife bought her last car, I stopped by the dealership after work to cosign all the papers and for some reason they entered my phone number into their database. They started calling me and each time I would tell them to call my wife because it's her car. It took probably 10 or 12 discussions with various people at the dealership to get our record updated. The general manager seemed to be as frustrated with their system as I was because he had to deal with me asking him over and over to fix the problem.
I fail to understand how repeatedly asking someone to cancel my service is being malicious, beyond depriving the company of the revenue they'd benefit had my membership continued.
It's not my job to go out of my way to help these folks meet their retention KPI. Categorically, full-stop and quite literally, that is not my responsibility. I'm a customer who used to pay money for a service, not a call-taker responsible for meeting certain metrics. I don't work for the cable company. I'm not their employee. I'm their customer.
If I don't want to be a member anymore, and I state as such, and repeatedly state as such when said company makes it as difficult as possible to cancel my membership-then I've satisfied my end of that particular transaction. I've stated my business request, I'm asking them in various manners to please honor that request. Where is the malice? If you want to point out that it's probably immature, then I'll probably agree with you. Comparing it to deliberately trying to tank a call-taker though by giving a deceitful and dishonest review I think is an incredible exercise in reaching.
So can you explain this for me? How are you drawing a parallel from me repeating my request to have my service cancelled with maliciously filling out customer response surveys in such a way that deliberately gives the call-taker a negative score?
"Well, I don't mean to overshare, but if you must know, I've been convicted of aggravated manslaughter and am scheduled for booking tomorrow afternoon. I won't be needing cable TV service for ten to fifteen years."
This used to to be the trick to use with the 10 CDs for a penny offers to get out of buying the remaining required full price CDs. After you got the promo-priced CDs, you could send in a change of address form with an address where shipping costs made it unprofitable for them to send the remaining purchases. They'd send a letter back where they regretfully informed you that you membership was being canceled because they didn't support your new address. All you had to do was figure out some address in rural Africa or Asia. Everyone in my freshman dorm used that trick to fill out their music collections.
> (b) A business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer shall provide a toll-free telephone number, electronic mail address, a postal address if the seller directly bills the consumer, or it shall provide another cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation that shall be described in the acknowledgment specified in paragraph (3) of subdivision (a).
17602...
(c) In addition to the requirements of subdivision (b), a consumer who accepts
an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to
terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which
may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that
a consumer can send to the business without additional information.
though it seems to only apply if the agreement was made online.
Cancelling by phone sound bad? Planet Fitness will only let you cancel in person or by certified mail. I moved to California recently, and I still had a Planet Fitness subscription (it was the closest gym to me and it was open 24/7, I won't be doing it again) and now I'm curious if I can use this against them.
At least with LA Fitness, I said I wanted to cancel and the guy at the desk printed out the letter for me. It was pretty low hassle. There are other gyms that make it a more insane process.
553 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] threadBut still, I'd prefer to use a simple web form to cancel service rather than sit through a 15 minute chat session
In my case, I was considering an alternative provider, I tweeted them to ask if they could match a competing offer, they made a different offer that wasn't good enough to keep me. I checked in another time with them on Twitter to confirm my contract was not in effect, which they confirmed. And then after my new service was installed, I informed them that their service had already been physically disconnected, and to please close out the account.
None of this came with muss or fuss, and I just hit up their DMs whenever it was convenient for me.
Getting them to ACTUALLY cancel can require more than a single phone call.
I got calls from Comcast for weeks afterward telling me that I needed to return my equipment. I kept telling them that I did return the equipment and have a receipt. The only thing that made them stop calling is when I described the receipt to the person on the phone as having "that big stupid NBC peacock logo that you stole on the top of it."
I guess without the logo description, none of the other callers would believe me.
I thought maybe I had the wrong phone number for cancellation. Turns out, when you google "cancel Equifax phone number", there are several phone numbers listed by Equifax itself, on various sections of its "help" pages.
Took me about half an hour to finally reach a human operator. Surprisingly, the cancellation process was quick with her with no haggling. But I imagine the process is so frustrating overall that a good number of people just give up.
My brain tried really hard to read "IVR gauntlets" as a description of wearables, like AR goggles, before I realised what you meant.
You are missing the "as". Please listen closely, as our menu options have changed. I know it by heart and can hear the same voice over and over again in my head. Crap!
Every. Single. Day.
I would like to give executives the option to stop this or go to prison for this never ending nonsense. I think most would choose to stop.
There are laws around this in other areas, it's not unprecedented.
And in emails they put in "We're experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of support requests and we encourage you to look at the FAQ instead".
Every. Damn. Time.
To be fair, you wouldn't believe the number of people that will send a request to support before looking at the FAQ when the item (and resolution) is in the FAQ.
I honestly believe almost nobody reads FAQs, and the presence of an item in an FAQ is a symptom of a UX failure somewhere down the line.
Every single flight, the boarding announcements start with something along the lines of "this plane is going to be more full than usual, so we're going to need to check some of your carry-ons".
Well guess what, United? Maybe if you didn't cram passengers into the fuselage like sardines in a goddamn tin can, you'd have enough room for everyone's carry-on luggage in the bins.
I would agree, but they charge for checked bags.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking but that's my $0.02.
GDPR also has no relevance for US interstate commerce.
South Dakota vs. Wayfair overturned the Quill decision, and, the Quill decision would have been the controlling precedent in any constitutional challenge, based on physical nexus. However, that all changed with Wayfair.
One of the key arguments in the overturn of Quill were that Quill created, rather than resolved market distortions. Essentially, Quill (according to the ruling in SD v Wayfair,) created a tax shelter for businesses that limit their physical presence in a state. The problem with Quill is that it disadvantaged economically identical actors for arbitrary reasons -- a small shop with a few items in a warehouse in a state would have to pay taxes on everything they sold in the state, while a large business (such as Wayfair) with no physical presence in the state would be advantaged by not having to charge a tax on the exact same items. Helping customers evade a lawful tax unfairly shifts an increased share of the taxes to those consumers who buy from competitors with a physical presence in the State.
"Quill’s physical presence rule has limited States’ ability to seek long-term prosperity and has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field."
So now, we look at the California law requiring online cancellations. It would be an extremely difficult argument to cite SD vs. Wayfair since the online cancellation requirement isn't creating a disadvantage on market participants or the states themselves. Lost economic development due to the imbalance created by Quill was cited repeatedly as a flaw in Quill. An online cancellation requirement is going to be very difficult to prove as having a deleterious effect on economic activity/growth/development as was clearly demonstrated in the majority opinion for Wayfair. Wayfair was essentially about tax shelters. The California law doesn't correct any particular economic harm.
However, that being said, any constitutional challenge to the California Law would likely fall short because the Supreme Court interpretation of the Commerce Clause essentially says that laws ought not present an "undue burden" on interstate trade. Allowing for online cancellation, would be, to say the least, a stretch to argue that it places an undue burden on doing business with people within the state. That's why, if this law were to go to court, it would be upheld since someone like the New York Times would have a hard time proving an "undue burden." Ironically (to me,) being required to collect sales tax in all 50 states as well as the thousands of individual jurisdictions (including multiple jurisdictions even within cities, thanks to economic reinvestment zones) -- that to me, seems like a massively undue burden. However, as the court rules in Wayfair, that burden is less important than the economic discrimination that was happening (i.e. a local online shop vs. an out of state online shop being burdened unequally despite selling the exact same product.)
As an aside, I might argue that a business without a physical presence in the state isn't availing themselves to the infrastructure or public services of that state, however they are being asked to pay for those infrastructure and services. Shipping companies actually do the deliveries and they, of course, are paying the taxes for their locality. But that's another debate. Incidentally, justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer joined Roberts's Wayfair dissent, in which he stated that Congress ought to be making the laws and not the courts. I never thought I'd agree with Kagan and Sotomayor on anything, but it is strange times in which we live.
In anyone's interested, Ginsburg, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Kennedy were in the majority on the Wayfair case while Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts and Kagan were in the dissent. gshulegaard ↗ This is a very detailed response! I appreciate your attention detail, but I did want to address initial comment reading my comment as proposing GDPR as legal precedence.
I never intended to forward the notion that the GDPR would serve as precedence. Indeed in a judicial context "precedence" has a very specific meaning and a piece of legislature from an international body of government would not be considered legal precedence in a U.S. court. I chose the phrasing "guide court opinion" carefully to specifically avoid confusion with the legal meaning of the term.
I agree with your analysis of SD v. Wayfair in that this is not likely a piece of legislation that would make it to the Supreme Court on interstate commerce grounds (at least in a post-Quill world). But if it did I would speculate the argument would center around the need for online firms to alter their behavior in other States as a result of the California law. To which I made the leap to suggest that the GDPR, as a current event, and it's affect on altering firms behavior even outside of the EU would be something that would likely be referenced in a Court opinion. Although, if you wanted to find an example limited to the US, you could also refer to the current status of EPA car emission regulations to demonstrate a similar single state regulation altering firm behavior across state lines without running afoul of interstate commerce.
But at the end of the day you and I are in agreement, this would not have much of an interstate commerce leg to stand on.
P.S. For those interested in the South Dakota vs. Wayfair opinion here is a link:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf
I found it interesting like /u/briandear and it is especially relevant for the tech sector.
Works every time.
But sadly there have been more times than I can count where I told them I have a speech impairment, it’s difficult for me to say certain things in the way they need me to right now, and I’d prefer to send them an email (even offer to send them an email for them to open while we are still talking)... And they said no they cannot do that for one reason or another.
I'm currently 3 for 3 but I guess you have a lot more attempts than I do.
Often hitting # repeatedly did the trick. But lot always.
I learned the other day that the CA Franchise Tax Board has a live chat via GetHuman [0] which saved an insane amount of time on hold. I was originally just trying to find alternate dial in numbers to actually talk to a person, not a robot.
[0] https://gethuman.com/phone-number/California-Franchise-Tax-B...
I don't remember which ones, but I've found several companies whose automated systems hang up on you after giving you a certain number of 'tries' to enter a menu option.
Have you tried using the NATO alphabet? I don't know if that would be easier or more difficult for you to say, but it's worth a shot, since it'd be less ambiguous over the phone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
It seems a bit more tedious, but the slower pace with reduced ambiguity means you almost never have to repeat yourself.
Worth giving it a shot, speech impairment or not.
"Matt, spelled Mike-Alpha-Tango-Tango"
And get the response:
"Ok Mike, now I need..."
There is a joke version of the alphabet that messes with all those rules. http://i.imgur.com/3CbAxSp.jpg
We ribbed him pretty good for that. I even created my own Completely Useless Alphabet from that incident:
A as in Aerie
B as in Barry
C as in Carrie
D as in Dairy
etc.
One thing though, when speaking to a robot, they’re not usually programmed for that. They want exact letters and numbers that their speech-to-text engine can convert. Eventually the robot takes me to a human after it fails enough times but there’s usually a queue, which isn’t always great because the wait times can be very long.
People without an ADA issue should send their cancellation notice to the registered corporate agent, return receipt, which sets the date of cancellation and gets their (expensive) lawyer involved. Threaten to sue them under your deceptive trade practices statutes if they continue to bill your account. Lawyers shed these kind of nuisance things quickly and cut through the bureaucracy. Your file will be stamped "service terminated" posthaste. There is no better way to communicate your desire to terminate service than to notify their registered agent in writing.
I don’t live in the US, so no idea which department handles that.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_agent#Registered_ag...
I’ve once signed up for a service and I didn’t know beforehand that their “delete account” button would take me to a page telling me that in order to shut it off I had to email them at least three business days in advance. I don’t have a general issue with having to inform people to shut things off the old fashioned way like via telephone or email.. but that’s for when I had to communicate over phone or email in order to begin the agreement. Such as with a consultant or contractor.. Not when they made signing up a quick and simple online process and then want to make it difficult to shut off so they can squeeze an extra payment out of you.
So I resorted to CC-ing a fake legal@ email address in the cancellation email, thinking maybe they would think I’ve CC-ed one of my lawyers (I didn’t have a personal lawyer, but they didn’t know that). They took care of it immediately.
This is a utility-maximizing lie. You're saving both yourself and the other person time. Unless you subscribe to some belief-system that holds truth-telling to be some sort of moral good in and of itself, everyone is better off.
And that's aside from the fact that the patter you'll hear trying to keep you paying is going to be full of, at the very least, deceptive statements lacking any objective truth or falsity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag#History
I was reading a Matt Levine column in which he described some litigation over selling bonds that was very analogous to the car dealer situation. And apparently what happened is that it was decided that lying about the price paid was ok per se, but creating falsified documentation to back it up was fraud. Which seems weird!
If you saw that a soda machine always dispensed a Coke when you pressed the Dr. Pepper button would you feel bad pressing that button to get the Coke you wanted?
There are times when it's moral to lie, other times when it's immoral to lie, and still other times when morality hardly has anything to do with it at all (such as the above scenario.) We tell small children that it's immoral to lie because we don't trust their moral judgement and would prefer they always tell us the truth.
Is it ever morally acceptable to tell a lie? Kant thought not. His example of the would-be murderer explains his reasoning. Read by Harry Shearer. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.
https://youtu.be/x_uUEaeqFog
Should you kill a person to save two? Kill two to save one? Does matter who the people involved are? Anti-Kantian philosophies don't have good consistent answers to this -- at least they don't live according to their philosophical answers.
None of this should suggest I think it's obviously wrong to lie to a stranger about whether you're deaf in order to avoid a conversation - that might be permissible according to generally accepted social rules. My point is more that when you start talking about deciding for yourself when to obey moral rules, you are on shaky ground, no matter how wise or logical you are.
While I agree with your first two sentences and think that they are well said, the third doesn't demonstrate the first; it demonstrates only that "hurting people can be done without lying", not "lying can be done without hurting people."
It’s like the squares/grid stuff used by car salespeople to get you to get a car loan instead of buying the car with cash.
You can take that as "not at all guilty".
However, I get messages of this kind from them bitches:
If your goal is to just end your contract (as permitted), I should not have to jump through any more hoops than telling them we're done.
Easy would be:
Considering the sort of problems people are discussing in the wider thread, this is pretty idealistic.
If I didn't have anything better to do I would have loved to submit about 40 tickets a day asking to close my account until they finally did and banned me.
I did it this way. I went to their live help chat. The moment I said "cancel", I was redirected to another representative, who was clearly trained in customer retention. I held my ground (which is so much easier for me in chat than on a phone call!) and cancelled.
But I managed to cancel through online chat..
It surprised me that a supposedly reputable news outlet is so quick to sell out its credibility. (guess I'll stick with the guardian)
That worked.
I moved out out of the country, they autorenewed, I called them, and they refused to cancel the rest of my year's subscription! They insisted upon continuing to send papers to my old address for an entire year.
Completely scammy, I will never do business with them again.
I'm curious what this does for in person issues, and if gyms will take a hit in CA.
I think unfortunately what will happen is that people will just hang up on the google assistant because it's not a real human.
It'll be kind of like what happened to the "glassholes". Maybe not as mean though.
As long as it's reliable and intelligent enough, I don't think people will mind. I know I wouldn't.
Explain to me, in detail, how you arrived to this conclusion from my previous statement. If anything, a business accepting robocalls from customers would make canceling easier.
I await your explanation, s73v3r_.
Glassholes were inconsiderate google glass users that refused to take google glass off when interacting with people. Duplex will end up like Google Glass for a similar reason -- people will force other people to interact with robots.
I think if I'm a human on the phone more than a few minutes a day, I might take exception to that. Especially if more than a few calls come in that way and there are enough bugs in the system to make it annoying.
One particular countermeasure will be to require a credit card number (or some other personal information) for cancellation... which I'm not sure Google Duplex would be willing to hand out over the phone.
I tried to pay off my mortgage this week and I had to go to a physical bank and handle them a check for seven hundred dollars. So stupid.
> you can write a “negotiable instrument,” bank talk for a valid check, on just about anything. According to the Uniform Commercial Code, the body of law that governs these things, all you have to include are the name of the payee, the dollar amount, the name of your bank, your signature, the date, and some suitable words of conveyance, such as “pay to the order of.” You don’t need the account number or the bank ID number you find on preprinted checks.
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/562/can-you-write-...
Of course the reason things are architected this way is so that more people can make money...
1. NAT provides a basic level of security for your network. The same could be achieved with a firewall, but it isnt the norm.
2. Even without nat, there would still have to be _some_ computer that does the processing on the raw data from the IoT device. There is no reason that couldnt be your PC or Phone, but the precedent has been set that these tasks are performed on a managed device in the "cloud".
3. The companies involved will make less money.
A better solution would be to have an IoT gateway device publicly accessible that proxies access to the individual IoT devices. This would create a better security story. If this device were standards based, then each IoT vendor could integrate with it, and router vendors could add the capability to their devices. Of course there is no financial incentive for things to work this way.
I guess I only bring up NAT because it is yet another example of the "server" lie. There is no such thing as a computer that is a "server". Programs act as servers. Computers might be "server-class", but all that means is that they are high quality. Driving a wedge between "servers" and normal PCs just pushes more control out of individual's hands.
2. No argument, does seem odd that it wouldn't be the app though. Figure a door bell wouldn't be all that intensive.
3. Yeah, recurring revenue is pretty much the gold standard.
A device that stands between your device and the public internet, provides security and access control, and is standards based... so a perimeter firewall? But with an API to allow internal devices to punch their own holes. Ehh don't get me wrong I like the spirit, but that would immediately get used by malware.
[1] https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/213608406-Phone-N...
However I bypassed this by subscribing with amazon where i can cancel subscription online.
I tried to cancel a credit card in order to escape a recurring charge I couldn't cancel. I was informed by Chase that because I had a previous auto-bill relationship with that company, its charges would follow me to my new card, and if necessary, my bank accounts.
And this one does the same? Who says that guy going through the emails for isn't otherwise going to be helping someone who is actually deaf?
> This gets around an unethical business practice designed to charge money from people who no longer agree to receive services.
This sounds like the most legitimate argument here, if this is indeed unethical. Not sure what my stance is on this.
From- Someone who works in billing for a SaaS company.
I mean you could argue the same for parking right? If everyone parked in the disabled section then you'd encourage having more such parking. And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.
They just don't want that. Because they don't want you to cancel.
Parking spaces on public roads is a separate issue, and it's more in line with driving in a bus-only lane (technically illegal but it is because you need a particular permit -- so it requires more than just being disabled).
My point is that your are jumping the gun with discussions of legality here. The litmus test should be wheter it's shitty to lie about a disability in order to cut through reselling bullshit. Other commentors have more than adequately covered this topic though.
What you can do is facilitate (or mandate) an automated system that allows people to cancel your service with them.
Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
> Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
This was not the point of my comment. The point wasn't to sympathize with the company for their costs. The subjects of concern were other people with disabilities who may have otherwise been helped by the same representative (who probably also couldn't care about the company's costs either). The point of mentioning the costs was that the costs imply they can't just instantly add representatives to avoid affecting other such customers.
A better analogy might be sidewalk ramps, which probably get used ten times more often for prams (strollers) than for wheelchairs. If they were absent or faulty, complaints by owners of prams can help grease the wheels of local government.
Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.
Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
> Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
Wait, what? No, it's like the former. How do you know these agents handling your cancellation weren't assigned to handle similar cancellations from other deaf customers? How do you know the representatives don't have to go through extra procedures (such as documenting and obtaining authorizations for the non-standard cancellation, or bothering more reps to figure out whom to forward the inquiry to) that wouldn't take them far more time than it would take the phone agent? Meaning you could well be taking up a resource that was reserved for disabled folks, slowing down the responses for them in the process. Heck, even if the amount of time spent isn't any more than for a phone call, it's likely to be a separate set of agents handling these special requests than taking calls, meaning you'll still be slowing down this service for those who actually cannot use the phone.
What I find baffling is that neither you nor anybody else is making the most compelling counterargument I can see here, which is that cancellations aren't time-sensitive, so a slower reply would be unlikely to do anyone much harm as a result of slow service. Meaning it's one way you could argue disabled people are not suffering any tangible harm from slow replies. But to argue that it doesn't even affect the service provided to them in the first place is bizarre, especially if you think about what would happen if tomorrow everybody decided to follow this advice and do the same thing.
Though even in your scenario, you are assuming that a company wouldn't adjust its resources as telephone usage drops and written submissions increases. And yes, the point you make in your second paragraph also applies—a written cancellation request places the time onus on the company rather than the customer.
But either way, it is always a good thing if the methods used by people with disabilities are mainstreamed rather than treated as oddball special exceptions.
It isn't like parking, because 99.9% of the time, it's in and out in a couple minutes, and 100% of the time you are physically present in the stall.
But if you take the only parking spot, that person pretty much has to go home. The car could be there for hours, even the whole day. Versus two minutes.
This huge moral difference is accurately reflected in the law- it is absolutely, perfectly legal to use a handicap stall without a disability.
Huh... that's actually very much the opposite of how I would interpret that sentence, but okay.
When someone asks me if I know something is illegal, to me, it seems they are being quite explicit that they are talking about legality and not morality, since otherwise they could tell me that that something is not cool, not that it's not legal. To me this is obvious, but maybe everyone else finds this strange and this is evidence that I just think weirdly, I don't know. But either way it's certainly not that I don't try to think in the first place.
Re the topic at hand. I think that people view this as at most trivially illegal. By bringing up the question, people are in some way assuming that you are against the new CA law. Not saying that you said that explicitly, but I think that is what is going on.
First of all, he said "deaf", not "hard of hearing".
Second ̶o̶n̶e̶, so you're fine with lying to get services you otherwise wouldn't if no one can actualy prove you're lying?
When it comes to them being dishonest about forcing me to call in order to endure a pitch to upsell me? Absolutely.
People with fully functioning hearing should have to sit through 2 hours of comcast customer service trying to cancel their service.
Only the lucky people who have handicaps should be able to easily cancel their subscriptions.
When you sign a subscription, no one promised it would be easy to get out of it. They're lucky not to have to pay a cancellation fee.
The cool thing about disability accommodations is that they're also super handy for the able-bodied, too.
I'm not super up on the history of computer dictation and voice control but I'm pretty sure some of that was driven for use by people with mobility limits that kept them from using a keyboard and mouse. Now we all have voice controlled virtual assistants.
Since when was the ability to cancel something online meant for the disabled?
Either you or a loved one is disabled, and that's why you're so sensitive (if so, I cut you some slack). Otherwise, I have no clue why you're throwing such a hiss about this. Many businesses (like cable companies) are being complete assholes by making it hard for you to cancel their service. Sometimes you have to lie and act unethically to get back at people like that. Hey, you wouldn't have to if they were ethical in the first place! They started this whole prisoner's dilemma! Me? I would love to cooperate and be honest all the time!
It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request.
I agree that it does feel a slight bit scummy, but after thinking about it I decided that I was OK with it. I can see how some others might think differently though.
I'm willing to take the risk.
Wow, that's interesting. They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)? How does that work for companies that give discounts (say) to the disabled? Can everybody lie to get them legally then? This doesn't sound right. (Note that it doesn't have to necessarily be the ADA outlawing this, so I wouldn't just rely on that.)
> Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one.
Do you mean to have one medically or legally? The former is obvious to me but the latter isn't.
That's correct, generally. I mean, if you show up at an airport with an oxygen take, be prepared to demonstrate that you medically require it. It's also different for employment, where your boss may ask you to provide evidence that you need a special accommodation to do your job.
The ADA has exemptions for when it would be unsafe or unreasonable to provide accommodation, and those are the only places where anyone can discriminate against someone for whatever their condition might be (eg the vision and prescription requirements for pilots). In fact the ADA explicitly disallows asking for any general information about disabilities - an employer can only ask yes/no questions about specific criteria.
I can’t imagine what their argument for not supporting someone cancelling their subscription would be.
Fun question: if you were to say you were cancelling for medical reasons would they be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if the call center asked what it was?
IANAL.
You basically described the whole field of advertising, if you make misrepresenting facts illegals, there's not a lot of businesses that would not be fined.
That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.
But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.
[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.
I agree, but at the same time you probably wouldn't be interested in saying most of these lies, so it's difficult to use that as a basis for assuming the legality of the ones we might be interested in.
> Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].
This is where I'm stuck. Fraud seems to have a wider scope than money (the obvious counterexample being if you're giving someone something other money, it can still result in fraud). What I'm unclear on is how wide the scope gets. Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages? I don't know what the answer is (which is why I asked), and it seems to me that it could go either way.
IANAL, to be clear. But yes, fraud is generally defined legally as deception for "gain", which is usually, but not always, denominated in money.
Beyond that, like everything else in law, it gets complicated. Are you asking about civil or criminal fraud? Where?
Also, even if you have a case that is technically civil fraud (say, I tricked you out of a dollar) or criminal fraud (I overstated my income on a mortgage application by a dollar), for small-dollar amounts you'll find you have a lot of difficulty actually bringing a case/no DA will touch it, simply because it is too small to waste court time on.
Incidentally, that final point is why ATT and Comcast want to kill class actions. If the people they cheat can't band together, it is too much trouble for anyone to recover that $2.74 "Up Yours Because We Can ILEC Infrastructure Recovery Fee".
Yet I think I have a stigma claiming illness or disability... don't know. So, next time I'm going to try this:
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466555 and marked it off-topic.
I'm also confused at your flamewar comment. I saw that people were keen to challenge me on the morality aspect, but it was not what I was actually objecting to or taking the discussion on -- I was asking about the legality. If you look and see where the OP himself finally responded to my question [1], we had quite a nice discussion on that very topic that even got upvotes with no objections so far as I could see (but do let me know if you see otherwise). How this a flamewar, when we had a nice and civil conversation on the exact subject I inquired about?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466984
If that wasn't what you meant, I'm sorry I got it wrong! Moderation is guesswork. We try as hard as we can to guess right, but definitely still get it wrong sometimes.
Why are you looking to cancel your phone plan?
Leaving the country.
They know they can't win me over and so they don't even try.
Though nowadays, in the era of pervasive financing and Wall Street investors that care more about revenue than cash flow, I wonder if that would even work. Maybe "I'm being investigated by the Feds and all of my financial relationships are considered suspect, and so would prefer to have as few of them as possible"?
I've had people still try to sign me up when I've said this. I had just moved country, had no job, and was literally living off my credit card. I ended up getting stopped by some people on the street trying to sign me up for some charity, because I'm too nice to tell them to fuck off.
Even after I explained that I literally arrived in the country a week ago, and that I literally have no money, they were still trying to get me to sign up for a recurring donation. Sure, I understand that they get commission, so they want to make a sale. But not only is it extremely unethical to try and get unemployed people to sign up, it's also trying to extract blood from a stone.
I've tried telling the truth, I've tried assertively stating I'm not interested, I've tried so many things...
...at this point, when I pick up a call, I wait for the other side to introduce themselves, and if they call with an unsolicited offer, I just hang up without saying anything. Am I a bad person?
I told the agent that same thing, and he said "Is that really what she wants, or is that just what you want?"
I kept things polite, but he really had me boiling by the end of the call, which took way too much time.
It's my favorite answer, because it normally creates enough awkwardness on the call to make the other party want it over as quickly as possible.
And getting them on your side is always step 1.
Bonus points if they ask "I hope it's nothing we did" and you respond with an extra long pause and "I think it's best for everyone involved if we get this cancelled as quickly as possible."
"Please cancel my service"
"We'd like to retain your business is there anything we can do?"
"Is my service cancelled yet?"
"Why are you cancelling your service?"
"My service is still working, can you cancel it? Is this the cancellation department? Who will be cancelling my service?"
Just pretend like I didn't hear anything they said or asked and keep asking variations of that in an increasingly childlike wondrous tone. Sometimes you can hear the person on the other end getting audibly frustrated until they give in and cancel it just to get you off the phone-and when they finally go "Your service will be cancelled on this date, is there anything else I Can help you with?"
"NOPE THANKS!" and hang up.
Never fails to make me giggle madly. Is it patronizing? Sure. Do I care? No not really-I've asked nicely that I want my service cancelled. That really ought to be the start and end of it. Meeting retention rates is their problem, not mine.
Same thing with upselling at retail establishments. No I'm not a rewards member. No thanks I don't want to sign up. Yep I'm sure. Oh I'm quite aware that I can save 10% over $2500 spent. Hey can I just buy this pair of headphones and gtfo?
Do you also maliciously fill out surveys with less than "excellent" ratings even after you are told that constitutes failure according to corporate management?
I understand the attitude of refusing to play the game, but that doesn't justify making things worse for other victims.
I've started doing this, although I wouldn't characterize it as malicious. I bought a car last fall and that started a ridiculous number of surveys coming my way. I contacted the dealership, the manufacturer, and the survey company asking for the surveys to stop. The dealer and manufacturer both responded saying they would take car of it. The survey company never responded.
The surveys keep coming so I fill them out randomly and return them. It isn't malicious because I'm genuinely dissatisfied with them because they can't stop the surveys.
It's not my job to go out of my way to help these folks meet their retention KPI. Categorically, full-stop and quite literally, that is not my responsibility. I'm a customer who used to pay money for a service, not a call-taker responsible for meeting certain metrics. I don't work for the cable company. I'm not their employee. I'm their customer.
If I don't want to be a member anymore, and I state as such, and repeatedly state as such when said company makes it as difficult as possible to cancel my membership-then I've satisfied my end of that particular transaction. I've stated my business request, I'm asking them in various manners to please honor that request. Where is the malice? If you want to point out that it's probably immature, then I'll probably agree with you. Comparing it to deliberately trying to tank a call-taker though by giving a deceitful and dishonest review I think is an incredible exercise in reaching.
So can you explain this for me? How are you drawing a parallel from me repeating my request to have my service cancelled with maliciously filling out customer response surveys in such a way that deliberately gives the call-taker a negative score?
Because I have explosive diarrhea...
> (b) A business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer shall provide a toll-free telephone number, electronic mail address, a postal address if the seller directly bills the consumer, or it shall provide another cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation that shall be described in the acknowledgment specified in paragraph (3) of subdivision (a).
I'm not a lawyer of course.
LA Fitness is another that lets you sign up online, and cancel only via certified mail.