This came out with poor timing.
You see, yesterday afternoon was spent trying to use a company’s website. I was sent a bunch of stuff from a company, complaining about my mother’s failure to respond to their entreaties — she died in 2024. I’m still dealing with random bureaucratic nonsense, because apparently they didn’t get the public announcement my lawyer published. So I called them.
What followed was steps similar to what you see above.
Except that I managed to get through to a human representative. Unfortunately, it was someone with a thick Indian accent, so we struggled for a while, but eventually we distilled everything down to a request for documentation, etc., and she was sort of helpful, and told me what to do to maybe clear all this up.
By faxing all these documents to a number. Faxing. Who uses a fax anymore?
I found a site that lets me email them stuff that then gets faxed, for a price.
I am now waiting to see if all that worked.
I also contacted Boeing, which went much more smoothly. I think I’ll miss the monthly copy of The Aerospace Mechanic that they’ve been sending me.
The charities are the most persistent. Despite my sending them a letter telling them my mother died in 2022, I still regularly get entreaties addressed to her. I’ve also given up monitoring her email as a lost cause, as for years nothing other than corporate dreck has come in.
Seeing a flowchart without start and stop cartouches still sets my teeth on edge, even 45 years after my formal indoctrination process came to an end. Is this what religious confliction feels like to others?
PZ: Your “xkcd” link goes to the previous post “Sorry, I’m going to be pessimistic again”, not to xkcd.
I got calls for my mother for at least 15 years after she died. I still get calls for my late wife nearly 3.5 years after her death. This tells me two things (I think), one is that phone lists circulate endlessly with no one ever doing basic checks on their validity, and two that none of these organizations either check or honor the Do Not Call List.
This is what the after life is. With the AI driven Eternal After Life® coming to an app store soon…
The previous owners of our house died in 2018, and we are still getting mail from charities addressed to them. Sometimes I will write, “Return to Sender. Addressee Deceased!” in bold red pencil on the envelope, but I think that only amuses me. I don’t think it’s ever worked to stop the charities from sending their begging letters. They are all religious charities, for what that is worth. That could be more of a result of the beliefs of the previous owners rather than the religious charities being more persistent.
As for navigating company phone systems, I gave up on that years ago. My current solution is to keep saying into the phone variations on the words; “Operator”, “Agent”, “Representative”. About 95% of the time that eventually connects me to a real, living, person. It may take 5 minutes of increasing frustration, but it’s better than trying to navigate those automated systems.
Your call is important to us. Please hang up and call again between 9:00 and 9:15 BNT, Tuesday’s only.
The first thing an automated telephone system should do is tell you how long the wait is to talk with a human. The second thing is to offer you a chance to leave a message. The third thing is to go through the ‘helpful questionnaire designed to speed things up with the human’.
I have received ZERO religious nonsense in my mother’s name. Although nominally a believer, she avoided all that phony piety. Much of what I get is more related to her long association with Boeing.
She built missiles for them.
Chime in with several others here — I still get mail addressed to my wife six years after her death. I take it as them volunteering to help clean up my charity giving list by removing themselves from consideration.
@ Rich Woods, #2: With you.
I used to have this exact issue 20 years ago, whenever Virgin Media’s flaky DHCP servers changed my IP address and gave me incorrect addresses for DNS servers. When I called their helpline to report that I could not get on the Internet, I would invariably be advised several times before speaking to a person that I might be able to find the solution on their website.
Since every solution on their website boiled down to “restart Windows a few times and if still no better, you might have to reinstall Windows”, it would have been useless to me anyway even if I had been able to access it.
A bunch of official documents, because laws were passed regarding faxes when they were the state of the art.
There’s free fax services to send a few short faxes by uploading a PDF. These days I assume they scan the PDF and integrate in to the latest AI models.
Yeah, that is always kind of the problem though, the “free fax” sites very much do, “short ones”. Which is a pain in the ass because a) the stuff you need to send to some clown that doesn’t have a better solution for you may not be short, and b) their interfaces are often just stupid. It was not that long ago that you could just, literally, send the “fax” from your printer/scanner combo (still can, in theory, if you have an old phone line), or on your computer, but again – it required a regular phone line. This is due to the fact that trying to send on over a modern VOIP phone doesn’t work so well (it fowls up the tones, or something, since its optimized to process voice/music, not clear, precise tone patterns), and everyone in the real world (i.e., not companies tied to stupid, outdated, laws), abandoned the process as inefficient and dumb, since you can just email a PDF, and even password protect it, if needed, so no one bothered to do the sensible thing of creating a TCP/IP data pipe that runs “FAX packets”, for clean integration.
Of course the insane irony of this is that they did create such translation layers for, of all the, comparatively useless, things – BBS software, which translates teletype data, from a console, on one end, into data for the web, then back to serial data on the other end, to feed into old software for freaking ancient message boards, and text based computer games. But, of course, this was hobbyist doing this, not “professionals”, who are doing silly things like running a damn business that needs to send secure documents, but can’t any more, at least not for free, and not using software on installed on your computer, along with the old modem that you “also” no longer have in the thing. Sigh…
This is like a lot of things, a mix of bureaucratic failure (i.e., no one bothered to change the laws), and failure to update the software – in the same vein as still needing to know COBOL to do banking for major corporations in the era of, “I have what was once a super computer on my own desk now.”