Your Call Is Important to Us

What if all those dropped calls, endless wait times and dead end hotlines every time you try to reach customer service weren’t accidents but part of the plan?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean Boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider. If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most.

• 0:43Roman Mars?

  Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most

• 1:26Roman Mars?

  engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel: that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles, and that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:55Roman Mars?

  Last summer, reporter Chris Conlon left his apartment in San Francisco on a simple errand to pick up his dog Rosie from his brother's house. It was a sunny, beautiful Saturday afternoon as Chris drove down Bay Shore Boulevard in his fairly new Ford Escape.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  And I'm going about 40, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the car shuts off.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  The steering locks up, the power brakes die, you can't do anything. And you know, there's not really emergency brakes like there used to be. So I'm just like rocketing down Bay Shore. And up ahead, I see the road sort of bend and there's like a little bit of a area where one would fly off. I didn't know what to do. I actually started like reaching for the handle, you know, the door handle. Like, am I going to do some like Lee Majors style stunt here?

• 2:46Roman Mars?

  Chris did not have to dive out of his moving car, thank God. Instead of flying off the road, the compact SUV somehow miraculously drifted to a stop. Obviously, the experience was pretty scary. Chris also had no idea what had caused the malfunction. And as he took the car from one mechanic to another and then another, he learned that they couldn't figure out the problem either. But Chris wasn't really worried. He had the confidence of a new car owner protected by a warranty. He was sure that Ford would fix this quickly and he would get on with his life. Easy.

• 3:21Roman Mars?

  So he reached out to the one place designed to help consumers like him with problems just like this: the customer service department.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  I call Ford headquarters and I'm like, okay, time to start talking about returning this car or whatever you do when it can't be fixed. And that's when they tell me, well, until we can replicate the problem, we can't make good on this warranty.

• 3:45Roman Mars?

  Again and again, Chris called customer service, hoping to reach a human being who would understand his issue and help him solve it. Instead, Chris's life descended into a months-long saga with customer care. He describes this whole experience as, quote, "a cretinous ordeal."

• 4:05Speaker 01

  I'm just making these dumb, boring phone calls, waiting on hold, getting transferred, having to type in my zip code again, having to re-explain the problem again. You know, increasingly, I find that I'm getting disconnected. The call gets cut off, or I get transferred back to the wrong person.

• 4:20Roman Mars?

  We have all been here, maybe with a car company, or your internet provider, or an airline. You call a customer service line, you get routed, and then rerouted, and then re-routed for hours. The call gets dropped, and after a few minutes of screaming into the void, you start the whole thing all over again.

• 4:38Roman Mars?

  Or you get a virtual assistant, who, no matter how many times you yell, "Operator," will not connect you to a real person. And then slowly, your will to fight starts to dissolve.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I started talking to people about it, and what they all said to me is, "Yeah, oh my god, I deal with this all the time." And I just reach a point where I say, "Fuck it." I'm sorry to go purple on you, Roman, but that is what they say. And I really feel like that encapsulates something about what's happening to us as a society. You have this parking ticket that you don't want to contest anymore. You have a claim that you can't argue about anymore. And you just say, "Fuck it, I'll pay the $30. I'll pay the $90." And I started to see that we are living in a state of "fuck it."

• 5:23Roman Mars?

  In the middle of his car ordeal, Chris also started to wonder if the headaches and frustrations we all face when we deal with customer service are all by design. And it turns out, yeah, a lot of the times, they are. Recently, I spoke with Chris about his latest story for The Atlantic, in which he writes about these kinds of obstacles in customer care that drive us all crazy. There's even a name for them. They're called sludge.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Sludge is basically the stuff that slows us down. It's friction, it's legalese, it's needless complexity. It's all of these things that... Don't rise to the level of, you know, a policy that tells you you can't have something. It's subtler and more insidious than that, but it deters you from getting what you're owed.

• 6:14Roman Mars?

  And you write that sludge is this term coined by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and Richard Hayler, the economist. And this is the polar opposite of nudge, which is the research about trying to get you to do things. This is trying to get things shut down, I guess, you know? It's cavernous procedural stuff on forums and questionnaires. It's the administrative hoops that you have to jump through to get basic things done. And when it comes to customer service, it's stuff like endless wait times.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can have perfectly good policy, but if folks are discouraged from getting whatever they're owed, then what's the point of the policy?

• 6:53Roman Mars?

  So you went about trying to identify the various tactics and companies and institutions used to create sludge, the secret art of sludge, so to speak. And to do that, you talk to people in the customer service industry. So who and what did you find that was enlightening for you?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I found was a guy. His name is Amas Tanuma, and he sort of became my deep throat. He has been working in the contact center industry, or call centers, we sometimes call them, for a couple decades. He started out as a call center worker, and he worked his way up to where he was setting them up, overseeing them, managing them around the world. And he starts telling me the tricks that they have in these call centers. And unlike most people in this line of work, he was willing to pull back the curtain and talk about some of the dark secrets of the industry.

• 7:44Roman Mars?

  So let's get into those dark secrets that shaped the design of modern customer service. What are some of the components that you were sort of led through by Amas Tanuma?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So first of all, obviously, when you need to call a company, you're not going to get through to a person right away. You're going to wait on hold. We are all familiar with the line, hold times are longer than expected, or however they phrase it.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  So that is a form of sludge too, because companies could hire enough call center workers that we don't have to wait on hold as long, but they don't. So that's step number one in creating sludge. You're going to talk to someone who needs to hear every little bit about, you know, who you are, where you live, what your phone number is. They're going to need to transfer you, you know, so it happens at that level. But it also happens above that. It happens when you are the company and you choose where to locate your customer service. I think we all probably remember that customer service got outsourced and then moved to, usually to places outside the country where labor is cheaper. And what Amos explained to me is that one aspect of sludge happens in that location

• 8:52Speaker 01

  because we have to make long-distance calls to reach those call centers. And there are more reliable ways of setting up those calls, I learned. And then there are cheaper ways, and those companies usually choose the cheaper ways. So that's another kind of sludge, because the call quality is poor. You do get disconnected sometimes. And so these are kind of more passive elements of sludge's architecture.

• 9:17Roman Mars?

  Right. So I want to ask you about the frontline of this customer service apparatus, the one that we deal with when we sort of encounter sludge. And that's the customer service rep. You spoke with Amos and others about these frontline people. Could you just talk about what that role is and how hard it is on them, actually, to deal with this?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, because as frustrated as we get with the person on the other end of the call, It is a really, really hard and pretty joyless job as far as I can understand it. I talked to a lot of folks who do it. And what they describe is more like a factory floor than an office job. Every aspect of their work is measured. There are all these penalties. If they escalate a call too many times, if they solve too many problems, if they give away too many credits, which is a term of the industry. So, yeah, it's very easy to get frustrated with them, especially when they are talking in this kind of inhuman corporate language.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  But I think it's a job that puts them in a really impossible spot where basically they're not trying to serve the customer. And a big part of Sludge, and this is what I heard from call center workers that I talked to, a big part of Sludge is having that person-ness, that humanity, trained out of you. Amos Tanuma said they're training you into being an algorithm. Because people are naturally empathetic. And as Amos told me, that doesn't serve the bottom line. They have to train that out of you very quickly. Otherwise, those call center workers are just going to be giving away what you're entitled to, and that doesn't help them.

• 10:56Roman Mars?

  And one thing that kind of encapsulates the problem with these call centers is something you mentioned about your own experience that I think we probably all experienced. And that's dropped calls and getting disconnected when you get transferred and all these little, you know, accidents, if you will. And you say, Amos, kind of explain what was really happening here.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I start calling him and I'm like, Amos, is this really accidental? Doesn't seem like it. And he just laughs. He's like, of course it's on purpose. You know, there are all these tricks. And one is these agents have something called an average handle time. What's your average length of your phone call, basically? They get penalized all the time. I mean, going to the bathroom, they measure the length of how long they're away from their headsets. So they are really afraid of getting penalized. If their handle time starts creeping up, what's an easy way to bring your average down? Hang up very quickly. So that's, that's one common thing. So yeah, those, those hangups are often on purpose.

• 11:52Roman Mars?

  And is this the kind of thing where it's explicitly stated somewhere in company policy that like a rep has to cut off a collar after five minutes? Or is it just a corporation incentivizing various departments to cut corners and cut costs without any individuals actually conspiring?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  It is hard to prove. It's insidious, it's subtle. These organizations are, are, the architecture of them is cellular. So, you know, if you are the person answering the phone, you don't know what the order was from, you know, two notches above you. You're just doing what's, what's been asked of you. So a lot of people aren't aware that they are perpetuating sludge. At the top, I don't think they say, let's do bad service. I think they just say, we need to, to bring these numbers, you know, to this place. Please make that happen. And that trickles down. So it doesn't have to be all deliberate, but it's still happening. And, you know, I always think about George Carlin line, you don't need a formal conspiracy

• 12:52Speaker 01

  when interests align. The interest is for us to give up and to walk away before we get what we're owed.

• 12:59Roman Mars?

  I love that George Carlin quote so much. And it makes me wonder, like, conspiracy or not, you know, for the companies that use sludge tactics on their customers, like hanging up on them, are there actual consequences? Like, is there accountability?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you have groups like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that's gone after Toyota for Toyota set up this hotline to give you a refund on something. And they, it was a dead end hotline. You couldn't get through. And ProPublica a couple of years ago showed that Cigna had saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would go through the process of appeal. Now, Cigna has since pushed back on that, I'm obliged to say. But it's that kind of thing where they know that you are just going to give up. Or they set up a hotline where you literally can't get through to a person because they're trying to get you to go online. They want you to deal with their website rather than a than a person on the other end of the phone.

• 13:58Roman Mars?

  You would think that sludge is actually bad for business in the long run, that companies would worry about making things like too sludgy and that would backfire and customers would just take their business elsewhere. Could you talk about the gamble that companies are willing to take in making this calculation?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. And I wondered that throughout my saga, why is this helping them for me to be this frustrated? Surely this is bad for business.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  It pays off. It's a calculation they're making. Maybe it doesn't pay off in the long run, but you know, these CEOs, their tenure is shorter than ever, so they are not going for

• 14:35Speaker 01

  the long-term health of their company. They're going for short-term gains, just just growing the company as fast as possible.

• 14:42Roman Mars?

  It's fascinating me how the whole system has sort of evolved to lead to sludge. Like a CEO's tenure is short, maybe shorter than ever, and they're paid more in stock prices than salary. So their incentive is to save the company as much money as possible in the quarter that they're in and increase share prices fast. So they want immediate results more than they're worried about keeping a long-term customer satisfied. Like, who gives a about that for us? Like, they're not providing more shareholder value at all. And you can then see how everything in this system leads to sludgy, frustrating experiences, the kind that we've all been through.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's totally right. It's the incentive structure. And so that means getting new customers rather than tending to the existing ones. And and we can see that, we feel that. It's really easy to sign up for a new service. It's really easy to pay a company money. You don't ever have to wait on hold to do that. Those wheels are perfectly well greased.

• 15:38Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  The problem is when you have a problem as an existing customer. So for those reasons, you start to see it trickle down into the call centers. You know, they need to hit their numbers. And when they don't do that, then that's when they have to start pulling whatever levers they have. But it's also our fault. That's something that that my source, Amaz Tanuma, pointed out. He said, look, yes, sludge is out there. It's insidious, but we as consumers and customers have a responsibility to.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  He said, "One of the most hated airlines in this country." He named it. I won't say it, but I think if you live in the United States of America, you can probably figure out what it is. People despise this airline and they get back on those planes every time as soon as the price is right. So we are not disciplined consumers. As a mosque told me, if we want to have an impact, if we want to try and move the needle in some way, we need to start by, you know, paying attention to who we support and who we don't.

• 16:41Roman Mars?

  I don't know. I mean, like, I get that there's a part of the system that involves me, but to say like, "It's my responsibility to unhook myself from the system so that it breaks," seems like a little disingenuous.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 16:54Roman Mars?

  Like, "They put me here." Like, "I was put here by them, not me."

• 16:58Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I know.

• 17:01Roman Mars?

  But I digress. Okay. I want to ask you about some of the more dangerous kinds of sludge. Like, I mean, you mentioned that, you know, you had to deal with your car problem, but you're a journalist, you work at home a lot, you have some free time. You can navigate this a bit differently than other folks. But there are things like changes to Medicaid, which are introducing new sludge into the system, like having work requirements, which are this dark and cynical form of sludge.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:28Roman Mars?

  Like, the system is getting more oriented, so they have to prove that you deserve these benefits instead of getting them more automatically. And these roadblocks to crucial public services can have really harmful consequences. Could you talk about the dangers of sludge when it comes to our society?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I had the privilege of fighting over something as small as a car. I mean, it was annoying, but it was just a car. There are people who are getting screwed out of insurance, out of SNAP benefits, out of all kinds of benefits they're entitled to and that have, like you say, real-world intense consequences. And you see it all the time. You see it in the big, beautiful bill. There are benefits that we are entitled to and we are being prevented from accessing them. And the consequences are huge. It has to do with our health. It has to do with, you know, whether our kids get the benefits or get food on the table.

• 18:27Roman Mars?

  Coming up, we'll get into some of the weird history of sludge and talk about ways to survive the sludgious parts of modern day customer service.

• 18:48Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful lounges.

• 19:33Roman Mars?

  Onboard, savor menus created by renowned French chefs, paired with wines and champagne selected by Smollet. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi. Then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel My Bed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions.

• 20:17Roman Mars?

  Crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean Boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider.

• 20:37Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 21:12Roman Mars?

  I'm back with Chris Collins, and I want to talk a little bit about some of Sludge's weird past because you discovered that Sludge has a quirky historical ancestor.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, on my hold times when I was waiting there going crazy, I would of course, you know, play on my phone, search for things on Google. And I started reading this field manual for sabotage that was created in the early 40s that our government made and distributed to citizens in Nazi occupied Europe. And it's an awesome document, one of the best documents our government has ever created. And you can get it online. It's very easy to find because it's been declassified. And it's full of these dumb little ideas for how you can sabotage whoever's keeping you down. In their case, the Nazis. But it's not taking up arms. It's weaponizing incompetence.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  So lose your tools. In meetings, bring up needless topics to discuss.

• 22:14Roman Mars?

  Give people the wrong directions, like make them go the long way. Like, so if you're in an occupied country, these are just all the things you can do as a citizen to just slow down the gears of the occupier.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And as I read it. I was thinking, oh, my God, this is what they are doing to us. This is sludge in a nutshell. It's all of these silly little ways to to sort of slow us down and impede our progress.

• 22:39Roman Mars?

  So that's kind of the ghost of sludge past, but I also wonder about the ghost of sludge future. So you're from San Francisco. I drive through San Francisco all the time and all the billboards I see are about AI agents helping me through customer service. But actually, they're they're trying to sell AI agents to companies to help me through customer service. How do you anticipate AI adding to or maybe taking away from the sludge? I don't want to be too cynical out of the gate, but.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  I was afraid you were gonna ask this. It's not gonna be good.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, AI is about to make things way, way worse. Obviously, we encounter AI already when we call customer service, but they are about to dump much more on us. And this actually goes back to COVID. COVID, as you'll recall, had us all locked in. We weren't going out, and so we had to do a lot more remote customer service. And companies had to hire AI to to field those calls. And after the pandemics started to let up and companies could sort of reappraise their systems, they took a look and they asked customers, you know, basically, how was that for you? And we all said the same thing. That sucked. That was terrible. Please don't make us talk to AI anymore. We don't like it. It was unambiguous.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And what companies heard was, so you tolerated it?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  So ever since ever since then, they took away this kind of deranged lesson, which is that we may not like dealing with AI, but we're willing to suck it up. And so ever since then, the race has been on to find new ways to bring AI to customer service.

• 24:18Roman Mars?

  And this is the ultimate like dehumanization of the customer service system. Yeah. Because you're they're just reading your syllables and translating it into something and then putting phonemes back at you and it's it's not an actual conversation.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  That's right. And to be fair, there are things AI is good at, of course. There are ways that it can solve problems more efficiently. Than human call center agents can do. But by and large, it drives us crazy. And that's a big part of sludge architecture is us going crazy.

• 24:48Roman Mars?

  I mean, I began doing like when I get it, you know, when I get like a sort of phone thing, I just began saying operator into the thing or hitting zero all the time. Are there like, what are some guerrilla tactics of just getting through the sludge? If they still work at all?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  I'm sorry to say those days are are behind us. It used to be that you could press zero or you could say operator or agent or speak unintelligibly and they would eventually connect you. But they have gotten wise to that stuff. They want to make you wait on hold as long as you can. So eventually you get frustrated and then you use their web portal, which may or may not work.

• 25:25Roman Mars?

  Yeah. So a few weeks ago, before my twins had to go to college, I had to get them their California Real ID and I sent in some of the proof of address and all the different forms ahead of time. And we decided to go first thing when they opened in the morning so that we could get into the queue properly. I didn't set an appointment. We just went really early in the morning. And when you go in, you get this kind of Delhi style number like D 25 and, you know, G 27, and it doesn't go exactly in order. Like you know that your number is coming up, but because they have these different letters, you know, it's a little opaque and they have some room to make decisions on the fly based on like, I don't know how important your problem is with the DMV.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:04Roman Mars?

  The point is, I was like struck by how things seemed so fair and just transparent enough that no one gets upset about it because we're all moving forward in the system. And I thought it was kind of this brilliant experience, like at the California DMV of all places, like that used to be exhibit A of sludge and they seem to have really overcome this horrible reputation.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. I think the DMV has gotten its act together. I think they got tired of being the butt of jokes. I suspect they did something called a sludge audit, which is what some folks who are battling the sludge phenomenon are calling for, just having this be a normal part of businesses and of government agencies. Do a sludge audit. Take a look at at your systems and see, are they sludgy? Can they be made more efficient? Can they be made less opaque? Yeah, I think I think that's an example of, you know, doing it right.

• 26:54Roman Mars?

  So your article is really fun because it's fun to find someone who is experiencing the same misery as you are, even though the subject of sludge is pretty dreary. But one of the things in your article that made my heart leap was you describing admin night, which is sort of like administrative night. And it's this thing that you came up with to deal with the sludge of the world. Could you describe admin night?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you. I love admin night. I love talking about admin night. I am now going to proselytize about it.

• 27:20Roman Mars?

  Please.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  A few years ago, I realized that among my friends, there was this new genre of excuse popping up into our discourse about why you couldn't hang out on Thursday night, like a time when we'd normally go get a beer or whatever. I started hearing from them and from myself, ah, you know, I'd love to, but I gotta deal with this stupid insurance thing, or I've got to fill out this form for my kid's school, or I've got to catch up on bills, or it was all familiar, normal, sort of domestic responsibilities. But there was just so much of it all of a sudden. It felt like we were just overwhelmed in a new way, at a new level. And I saw it kind of atomizing us.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  So I fired off an email to a bunch of friends and neighbors and I said, come over next Tuesday night, bring a six pack, bring a big pile of whatever paperwork has been weighing on you, or whatever stupid bureaucratic thing you've got to deal with, and we're going to do it together. And so that became this thing that I call admin night. So friends come over and we do admin together. You talk for five minutes, you know, chit chat, and then you put your heads down and you power through whatever stuff you've got to do for about 20 minutes. You take a break, you hang out some more, have a drink, have some snacks, and you just do this for a couple hours. And at the end, we all go around the horn and each person names some dumb little thing that they checked off their list and we all cheer.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And it's awesome. It sounds like a really nerdy thing. It doesn't sound like the kind of party you might picture when you think of parties, but it's kind of cool.

• 29:00Roman Mars?

  I love it. I love it. It actually made me so hopeful amongst all this that I was like, oh, my God, maybe we could get this. Admin Night, if that came out of this, like your research into sludge, I mean, that would be just beautiful.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 29:15Roman Mars?

  Because that's what it is. It's like, it's the doing it alone, feeling crazy.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:21Roman Mars?

  It's also just like the energy to do stuff, just to respond to these things. And just like, it's just like the fact, I mean, you're just, you're turning a sludge into nudge. It's pretty great.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  I also think part of the fun is just daylighting sludge. By having a thing called Admin Night, by acknowledging that we are all drowning in this stupid stuff, that alone feels good. That alone is worth something and it's part of the fight against [BLEEP].

• 29:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. So let's, let's close the loop on your Ford saga. So what ended up happening after you sort of like hit their sludge and then had to navigate it for months on end?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what didn't happen. I didn't turn into the guy I read about in Utah, who got so frustrated with his car situation that he crashed his Subaru through the front door of a dealership. I didn't do that.

• 30:12Roman Mars?

  I'm glad.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Pleased to say. After, I think it was a little over 100 days, but eventually I did talk to someone who began the process of buying back the car. And ultimately, that's what happened. They handed me a check. I surrendered my broken car. And then the crazy thing is they had told me they might resell it. And suddenly I was in the grips of an ethical dilemma all over again. Is this car going to get sold to someone else? Are they going to disclose what's wrong with it? I don't have a lot of faith that they will do so, given all the stuff I've seen up to this point. And they couldn't really tell me, but the article came out. And since then, some readers have taken it upon themselves to do some research. I got.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  The Atlantic to publish the VIN of my car in the article because I wanted, I was so worried that, you know, some poor schmuck is going to start driving this dump car. And someone looked up the VIN, they found the car. I think it's in Kansas. I need to do a little more reporting, but I think someone out there is now driving this car and I hope that they got it fixed.

• 31:15Roman Mars?

  Wow. So it's like, it's like operational in Kansas, not sitting on a lot somewhere.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  As far as I can tell at this point.

• 31:23Roman Mars?

  Wow. Well, I'm sorry for your struggle in this whole thing, but I am very happy that you wrote about it and talked us through sludge because just the act of identifying and putting words around this thing that we all feel is this great public service that I appreciate. And thanks so much for being on the show again and talking with me at a fun time.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  No, I did too. Thank you for having me.

• 31:49Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson and edited by Joe Rosenberg. Makes by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and George Langford. Our executive producer is Kathy too. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lay, LaShma Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our Discord server and you can find all of our past episodes at 99pi.org.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  All of our representatives are currently busy. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered by the next available representative. The estimated hold time is currently less than 96 minutes. Thank you for your patience.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Hey everyone, it's Stavros Halakis and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, Stavvy's World. Each week, we're joined by great guests like Josh Safdie, Eric Andre, Caleb Heron, and more. It's sort of an interview show, but really, we're just messing around, making each other laugh, and hopefully making you laugh while you're washing the dishes, or grocery shopping, or on a long drive. Plus, I take listener calls where we have honest conversations about dating, life, and everything in between. Imagine if your therapist was a vulgar degenerate whose office was in a Greek diner. No scripts, no polish, and absolutely no holding back. Listen to Stavvy's World wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:08Speaker 04

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• 34:38Speaker 05

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