[ABCLAW]

I've had staff at an unnamed $10B tech company in CA tell me that they 'trusted their system' and that 'the data never lies' after one of their staff members made a process mistake by failing to log some information a few minutes earlier at a support kiosk while we were getting our passes set up. The practical result of the failure, if unremedied, would have been that I was out $3,000 and a week of my life was burned.

What ensued was an hour long debacle with staff yelling at my girlfriend until she broke down crying. She was accused of stealing, defrauding them, ruining the event. It was not pretty to the point that I had to physically restrain a friend of mine from starting an altercation.

I repeatedly, politely, and calmly asked them to speak with the support staff member who handled our issue to see if there was an issue. The manager told me "he's an idiot. His opinion doesn't matter. The computer isn't lying."

Eventually, after a lengthy period of time in which the manager insinuated I was a laundry list of undesirable things, relented. He went to go speak with the staff member and in doing so saw that our passes were literally sitting on his desk in plain view. They hadn't been logged as out of circulation, so our new passes weren't working yet.

He returned, told us he fixed the issue, did not apologize and walked off. A day later the company suffered one of their biggest PR gaffes to date while the manager in question sat in the front row aghast.

Turns out nerds (and I use that term with the greatest affection) can be stupid too.