[arctic-true]

I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.) I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?

[skeuomorphism]

This is more or less the go-to standard in the usa. One property manager handles possibly hundreds in an association, or dozens of townhomes, and will refuse to speak to you directly, except through a maintenance request system. Its incredibly depressing

[AnotherGoodName]

The electrical panel beeps an alarm constantly. Sent an email to the property management company. Guy comes over and presses a button to silence it for 24 hours. Rinse repeat for months on end. No method of escalation beyond the automatic replying inbox. I’m fine. twitch twitch Welcome to 21st century distopia!

[Eisenstein]

Whatever that panel is responsible for, that thing isn't working properly, its just set to be silent temporarily. Find out what regulatory body in your town deals with that panel's responsibility, contact them telling them that of the issue and say that you have contacted them when you submit your next ticket.

[ryandrake]

...and deal with that regulatory body's automated bot response.

Customer service is bots all the way down.

[jclulow]

I had some serious struggles with the delinquent landlord and property owners, and the dangerously incompetent builders that plagued our building in Alameda for years. While they were not always legally empowered to come and stop the skulduggery, the Alameda city council offices of planning and compliance were the only people who consistently and professionally responded to phone calls and emails and were available if you went to their offices. People complain about public servants, but at least in Alameda they were really good people doing their best.

[_DeadFred_]

The Republicans have spent 40 years with their intentional policy being to make government services worse so that the Republicans can then point to that and say 'we need to get rid of government'.

It's hard for government to function well when half of it is trying to sabotage itself. The fact it works as good as it does after 40 years of that is a tribute to public servants.

[idiotsecant]

Generally public sector employees are pretty good. Demonizing them is part of the movement to tear down the machine of state that we spent the last few hundred years building, so that a select few can grab chunks of the burning wreckage on the way down.

[bryanrasmussen]

https://medium.com/luminasticity/services-of-illuminati-gang...

if you get a response from the "Bureaucrat Bot" you just got to fire up the "Annoy Customer Service Bot" as a counter-measure

[jacquesm]

Call your building's insurance company. That will get you a very precise response pronto because they're going to use this as an excuse not to pay out if anything should happen to the building.

[nradov]

How would a tenant identify the insurer?

[jacquesm]

Minutes of HOA is where I would normally get that kind of info. They have to justify the amount you pay and the insurance invoice is normally divided across all of the tenants.

[nradov]

That only works for unit owners, not tenants.

[shakehar]

Call your fire department on their non emergency line and report this.

[ssl-3]

Called the fire department's non-emergency line. Got a bot. The bot sent out someone who said the noise isn't a safety issue, and left.

Called the police department's non-emergency line. Got a bot that told me it's a civil problem and that there's nothing they can do.

Scouted out the fire department and chatted up the fire chief in person while he was walking back in after lunch. He was very concerned about all of this (finally, progress!) and called the management company while we stood there, but his call was answered by a bot that said someone would be out in less than 24 hours to silence the noise again.

[...]

[nikitau]

Great stuff. Would make Kafka blush.

[egeozcan]

There should be a unit of dystopia called Kafka, these days. Renting an apartment from a management company should be like 3-4 Kafkas. Go from there.

[SoftTalker]

You've got to follow incentives. It's almost certainly a code violation, which comes with escalating fines until it's corrected. The local building, zoning, or whoever-enforces-codes authority will be interested in collecting that if they can, and the owner will want to avoid them, so that's where I'd start.

[ssl-3]

Called legal aid. The bot that answered the phone submitted a complaint to the court and the management company which cited the correct historic documents and demanded compliance with them.

The management company bot responded to the court declaring that they're doing all they're required to do to correct the noise, and concluded with "the issue is not ripe for adjudication" -- whatever that means.

The court's bot agreed and binned the complaint "with prejudice" -- again, whatever that means, and sent me a fine for wasting their time.

Every day, the noise still happens.

And every day, the man from the management company still shows up to silence the noise.

I've come to know him fairly well.

It turns out that his name is William, although everyone calls him Bill. Bill is a nice guy who once studied computer programming, but the best-paying job he ever managed to get was slinging packages for Amazon back when that was still a thing that people did.

Most Thursday nights, if we don't have anything else going on, Bill and I go bowling at the AMF that's not too far down the road. It was his idea. We've been doing this about every week for long enough that I've learned to become a pretty proficient bowler. And while I still enjoy that part, we spend most of our time having a few beers and solving the world's problems.

A few months ago, we started talking about pinsetters and Bill mentioned that he read once that this was once a job that people did manually -- that rather than having a machine at the end of the alley, there were people behind the wall who would collect the scattered pins and put them back onto the painted dots on the floor. That sounded pretty archaic compared to the machines that I've seen doing this work for my entire life, but it seemed likely enough.

I started thinking about some other things about bowling: These days, we just walk in and our shoes are ready for us by the time we make it up to the front. We pick our own lane and just start bowling. After that, the machine sets the pins, keeps the score, and returns the ball. Pretty normal stuff.

And then, Bill pointed out the other people: There were a couple of small groups of people who were bowling, and one grizzled old fellah nursing what looked like a White Russian at the bar, but that was it. Nobody else was present; nobody actually worked there at all.

How long had it been since I asked for a pair of size 11 shoes, I wondered? When was the last time I talked to a bartender to order another beer? I hadn't paid for a thing using a card, or even carried anything like that with me for what seemed like eons. The self-cleaning bathrooms were certainly a welcome change, but how long ago were those put in and what happened to the person who used to clean them?

Neither of us could pick an exact timeframe for when these things changed. We both agreed that it wasn't important at the time, and that it seemed like a natural-enough progression.

Anyway, it was getting late again. After we put our shoes onto the mat for the sanitizer bot to deal with and started to walk out, the screens by the door told us what our tabs were, debited our accounts, and told us that it would see us next week.

I'm sure that Bill will stop by tomorrow afternoon to push the button and silence the noise from the electrical panel for another 24 hours, just like he always has.

[GJim]

So deliberately set the alarm off. Guaranteed to provoke a response.

[MisterTea]

I have not heard of a beeping panel box before. The only thing I can imagine are some newfangle AFCI or GFCI breakers that are either nuisance tripping, tripping from actual faults or plain defective.

[AnotherGoodName]

This is on the building as a whole to be clear.

[wiseleo]

I'd invite a fire marshal into that discussion. They'll know whom to call if it's not their purview, but electrical panels tend to be a fire risk.

[Octoth0rpe]

But at least they're passing on all the savings to the renters, right?

....Right???????

[gzread]

I once called a hotel to book a room and the voice AI bot told me that it does not have a room because it is an AI model and does not have a physical location. I booked a different hotel.

[bigtunacan]

A delayed response doesn’t mean it’s not automated, just that it wasn’t built to not feel automated.

I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.

[avidiax]

That's even worse. If it's going to be a bot, at least give the advantages of the bot and be somewhat honest about it.

[yetihehe]

> give the advantages of the bot and be somewhat honest about it.

The advantage of a bot is for owner of a bot, not for those forced to use that bot. So, owners are incentivized to lie about bot usage.

[vidarh]

Well, there can be an advantage in a bot too, if it can actually resolve some subset of problems faster and allows for more timely escalation of what is left. The problem is of course that is far too often not how they are used.

[yetihehe]

> The problem is of course that is far too often not how they are used.

The underlying problem with today's world is that people only want to solve their problem at the cost of everyone else. Everything else (like bot's, ai) is only a tool which is used on the way to enrich an individual.

[avidiax]

I think it runs deeper than that. Customers are overly swayed by the up-front cost of a product or service. They don't want to pay a little more for a product that has good customer service, at least not until that customer service is legendary in the industry, and often not even then.

We could have the Swiss model, which is a bit of a culture shock: the customer support line is a paid service like a premium rate 1-900 number. It's very hard to wrap your head around as an American, but it does result in customer support that's very fast, and they either solve your problem quickly or not. And there is an incentive alignment, where you pay for the good support as a separate service, so it should not affect the base price of the good.

In a competitive industry, paid support would be a win-win. High support customers pay for the support they use, and less demanding customers don't pay anything. And if the product needs lots of support because of quality, then customers can choose a competitor.

[thesuitonym]

If the bot could resolve my problems, I would have resolved it already on the website.

[carlosjobim]

Sure, but an instant response is almost guaranteed to be a bot.

[csa]

> I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?

I will go out on a limb and suggest that they are probably happy that you’ve self-selected out of the process.

I’m not saying your expectations are unreasonable, but you have higher expectations than most consumers, and that ultimately becomes a pain in their ass.

[gleenn]

I feel like it's not higher than most consumers, if I have a problem that is serious enough then that's the benefit and direct trade-off of renting - it shouldn't be my problem and my landlord should take it seriously. If everyone self-selects out we are just making the rental market even more hostile.

[garciasn]

I do Rover for extra fun money and I get to watch other peoples dogs when I don’t have one myself right now.

Several folks have noted that my immediate reply threw them for loops. One told me she thought it was spam that I responded so quickly.

Rover has a “Star Sitter” designation and response time is one of the metrics. Star Sitters show up at the top of the algorithm’s results so I’m incentivized to keep it up. Plus; I absolutely despise waiting forever for others to reply and I want to make sure I get bookings, knowing there are MANY available sitters in my area.

I never would have thought it was spammy or suspicious AI behavior. Thank you for cementing it in my mind that maybe I’m a little too eager. Considering I’m entirely booked out until mid-October, I’m either doing something right or people are that desperate for a good human to watch their pup for them.

[Barbing]

Is this suspicious, probably:

“ps— hope I hit my goal of responding in <5min like I said in my ad!”

(w/biz hours mentioned in ad)

[resize2996]

I found a good cat-sitter through Rover and would do crime if she made it a condition of her next visit.

[EGreg]

That goes for all AI generated content

If you can’t be bothered to write something to me personally, why should I deal with you? :)

[dspillett]

It's like the Google¹ advert “if your phone can answer your friends text, shouldn't it, instead of them waiting or you”. No, it 'king shouldn't. And if I find they are using automation to talk to me, I'll talk to someone else. Or I'll bot up myself and have my people talk to their people…

--------

[1] I think it was one of theirs, could have been one of the Android phone makers that has gone all-in on nagging me to give their bot something to do with itself.

[randomNumber7]

> If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?

Most people fail to come to a conclusion by induction so they'll find enough customers.

[blitzar]

I get along well with the amazon returns / late delivery bot - I think I prefer it to the humans.

[array_key_first]

In the past 20 years I've noticed a trend of companies making it harder and harder for me to give them my money.

For apartments, when I would look they wouldn't even bother to tour me half the time. I couldn't believe it.

I'm trying to give you thousands of dollars a month. In a CONTRACT. And you won't even show me the product I'm buying?

One place told me it was dark outside (4pm...), and they didn't feel comfortable touring me around the apartments. Jesus Christ, are we in Gotham? Many just ghosted my touring requests. One turned me down because it was raining (???). I would show up in person in the office, and many would still refuse to tour me.

[jafo1989]

> In the past 20 years I've noticed a trend of companies making it harder and harder for me to give them my money.

They want your money, they are just getting stricter on how they will accept it in order to limit liability and meet compliance, and also maximize profitability.

Much, much better tools these days to address both of those than there were 20 years ago.

[gwerbin]

> And you won't even show me the product I'm buying?

They'd rather rent to someone who is desperate enough to rent without seeing it. It's not that they don't want money, it's that they don't want your money, they want someone more abusable instead.