I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I’d looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I’d seen.
I jabbed at the “Power” button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle.
What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began.
That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.)
“We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,” the guy told me a few days later. “But we can’t identify the problem.”
Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.
“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.
“Might,” he said. “Might not.”
I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.
“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”
This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center.
Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she’d call back the next day.
Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela’s line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle’s malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn’t apply.
“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.
“I understand your frustration.”
Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car.
“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!
As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn’t even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I’d slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through.
Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.
“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”
On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.
Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.
I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?
[ed. I was trying to explain the concept of friction to a friend recently and he just didn't get it. But once you understand it, you see it everywhere. Other examples not mentioned in this article: impenetrable user agreements continually being updated to make sure administrative processes like appeals, refunds, lawsuits etc. are nearly impossible to pursue; Right to Repair issues where anything from from John Deere tractors to automobile software, to mobile phones, to printers, etc. (the list goes on and on) that require specific parts only available from the company you purchased the product from (despite available substitutes). Conversely, a whole new universe of companies and apps have been created to remove friction (think Stripe, Venmo, Uber, Doordash, etc. etc. etc). So of course, the Trump administration has been actively working to kill one of the only protections available to the public - the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPB). They haven't been able to completely eliminate it yet (despite significant DOGE downsizing) so instead they've made it useless for its intended purpose and decided to weaponize it to advance the administration's anti-woke agenda.]
