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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

> I ask to talk to a manager. Apple support manager calls me and confirms everything that the rep said. She keeps on saying that she "understands my frustration". Gee thanks. She says that it's frustrating for her too as this is something that happens frequently. That's when I start laughing. I ask her "This happens frequently and you haven't come up with a solution yet!?!?" She just keeps on apologizing and tells me that maybe I can post on the customer support forum and maybe if enough people do so, a change will be made.

From this account the manager sounds like a nice person who is essentially powerless to do anything. Seems like an incredibly frustrating position to be in.

My comment from a few days ago fits pretty well here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36933489

Whenever people say that "AI will replace all the jobs": remember these stories.

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My issue with this is that the CS rep reframed what is essentially theft--assuming it's a straight up error on Apple's part--to the tune of hundreds of dollars as "frustrating," and then suggesting that oh yeah, "it's frustrating to me too".

This is handling on the part of the rep, and it's not "frustrating," it's infuriating.

To take the example to the extreme, imagine if you get a call from a cop who tells you that your child has been killed, and they say "I know it's terrible, but it's terrible for me too, I had to call you about your dead kid."

Even if it's broadly accurate that it is "frustrating", the CS rep will go home that night not short a few hundred dollars because a giant multinational corporation just... took it.

I think I'd rather be locked out of my Apple account and lose access to some stuff than be stuck in a job where I have to powerlessly tell people that this has happened to them every day.

I get where you're coming from. But in the end we're all powerless "cogs in the machine" with much of our autonomy stripped by, ehm, who even? Apple Management? Some Apple engineer who wrote this? The Algorithm (which may or may not be comprehensible and may or may not be able to explain its decisions)? Someone/thing else? I feel we need think about this on a higher level than just "customer X was kicked in the teeth" and even "customers regularly get kicked in the teeth".

It's pretty common that the front line don't and can't know the underlying details, especially in situations that might have overlaps with law enforcement / crime.

Apple gift cards are a massive vehicle for fraud, both in extracting value from stolen credit cards, and in scams ("the IRS has frozen your SS number...send iTunes cards or get arrested!"). There are places that sell Apple cards 80%+ off face value, the use of which is a very good way to get your account locked. Stolen/scammed Apple cards should have a market value of nothing.

I know nothing about this particular case or whether such gift cards played a part. And ultimately getting completely locked out of a digital identity without recourse is ridiculous and demands legislative remedy. However I'm pretty cynical about these sorts of stories at this point. Perhaps it's years of playing in first person shooter games where it's normal to see cheaters/hackers wail about their innocence when banned, to eventually changing their story and just going radio silent when they're proven cheats. Apple has absolutely no benefit to arbitrarily banning random people for fun. Not that it couldn't happen, and errors absolutely happen, however it usually isn't random.

That's basically the support Google provides for consumer service subscribers. "24/7 support" isn't really useful when all they can do is refer you to their help portal and come up with titles when you ask to talk to a supervisor, manager, etc, in addition to swapping around the communication medium, so from live chat with 2 minute response times to emailing with two day response times, and eventually flat out ghosting (no "your ticket has been resolved") because the support "manager" understands that the conversation is going nowhere.

My sense isn’t that they don’t have a solution, it’s that the people you talk to, including “managers” are just fancy drones who have not been granted any nontrivial decisionmaking power by the Company. They just follow decision trees and act as a car bumper for small collisions.

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