The Asymmetry of Incompetence

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From Thoreau, who lives nearby and who I really ought to meet someday:

I’m probably just dwelling on the trivialities of my comfortable suburban professional existence, but my basic grievance against big companies is that when they screw up they take 6-8 weeks to fix it, usually after multiple phone calls and whatnot, but if I screw up a penalty is immediately levied. This happens on every scale, from billing snafus with $7 fees, to cases of people being foreclosed on even though they had never missed a payment and spent money on lawyers to prove this, to “Oops, we broke the global economy, could you send $1 trillion to our Nigerian accounts?”

The latest snafus on my end are (1) I’m getting a bill for water service in an apartment that I moved out of, for a billing period that doesn’t overlap my last month in that apartment and (2) I set up autopay with another utility, or at least tried to, something didn’t go through, and now I’m paying a $7 late fee….It’s not the $7, it’s the asymmetry of the responsibility. If I screw up (and I still maintain I did everything necessary for autopay!), I have to pay a late fee. If they screw up, they give me runaround. As long as it’s $7 at stake, fine, but they do this at every level. I think of the hassle I had to go through to get the title for my car after I paid off the loan (early) and I can’t even imagine the hell it must be to have your house foreclosed because of a snafu that they didn’t even notify you of (because of another snafu).

So, I say that we should be able to put large companies on hold when they want something, send them through phone trees, and ask them to re-submit paperwork that we may or may not lose track of.

All in favor, raise your hands. Motion carried! 

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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