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本文在一个故事中介绍了今天的新闻通讯。在这里注册。
In hindsight I’ll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent.
事后看来，我会说：我一直认为发疯会更令人兴奋 - 用浴袍漫游街道，大喊果实。取而代之的是，我度过了一个疲倦的季节，说代表。向机器人说单词和数字。再次清楚地说，等待，脱离联系，终于接触到一个人，但是错误的人，重复我的故事，我会再介意一个简短的人。愿我的孩子们永远不会看到我发送的电子邮件，或者我按1 for Agent的del妄的deli妄。
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.
我很想埋葬整个cret的磨难，只是我看着窗帘后面并发誓要记录我所看到的东西。
It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I’d been driving to my brother’s house, going about 40 mph, when my family’s newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it.
这一切始于去年7月，在旧金山。当我家人的新福特逃生简单地冻结时，我开车去了哥哥的房子，大约40英里 /小时：方向盘锁定，电动刹车死了。我既不能引导汽车也不停止汽车。
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.
我在试图摆脱车轮的同时踩着“电源”按钮，没错。向前看，我看到这条路向左弯曲了几百码。我打算从Bayshore Boulevard和路堤上航行。我伸手去拿门把手。
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.
取而代之的是纯粹的副疾病运气：在道路上的曲线前十英尺，汽车飘到了停下来。我松了一口气，我点击了危险，故事开始了。
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.)
那天下午，我分散了一个被保修覆盖的男人的信心，我把汽车拖到了我们的机械师身上。（我首先尝试骑行一次 - 谨慎地驾驶 - 最大的故障是flu虫。在10分钟内，它又发生了。）
“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.”
几天后，那家伙告诉我：“我们可以从计算机代码中看到存在问题。”“但是我们无法确定这个问题。”
Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.
然后他问我是否想来上车。
“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.
“这不会再发生吗？”我问。
“Might,” he said. “Might not.”
“可能，”他说。“可能不会。”
I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.
我说这听起来像是一种低于驾驶的方法，问他是否可以再次尝试找到问题。
“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”
“看” - 毫无疑问的叹息 - “我们不会只是去所有车辆上搜索。”
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.
实际上，这是我认为他应该做的事情的完美描述，但是没有说服他。我把汽车带到了另一个机械师。第三个机械师看了看。当每个人都告诉我同样的事情时，根据保修，它看起来像是更换汽车的时间。我打电话给福特客户关系中心。
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.
通过电话树ping着我的方式，我最终与一个名叫帕梅拉的人（我的案例经纪人）建立了联系。她吸收了我的故事，给了我她的延伸，并说第二天会回电。
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.
几天没有电话，她也不会接我的。我试图在福特找到其他人，并被转回帕梅拉的线路。偶然，我终于与拥有实质性信息的人建立了联系：除非可以复制我们车辆的故障并因此确定，否则保修将不适用。
“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.
我说：“但是没有人能复制故障。”
“I understand your frustration.”
“我理解你的挫败感。”
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.
在接下来的几天，然后是几周，然后再过几周，我当然被您熟悉的现代存在的角落。您可以通过与自己的汽车公司，保险公司，医疗保健网络，互联网提供商，公用事业提供商，流媒体服务，或护照办公室或DMV或DMV或或或或或或或或或或或或或或或或或或心打交道，知道这一点。我的电话开始迷路，或者横向转移给需要先前修复故事的人。随着时间的流逝，我可以预测每次对话的情感轮廓：脚本式的同理心，无尽的路线，最终达到一位经理的承诺。有一次，有人告诉我福特一直在给我发送更新。事实证明，他们以某种方式为我设法了一个电子邮件地址，这与我的真实联系没有关系。奇怪的是，与我交谈过的许多客户服务和经销商似乎都忘记了整个前提，建议我恢复驾驶汽车。
“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!
“你会把孩子放在里面吗？”我会问。他们很震惊。如果转向冻结的话不是！
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.
就像这种经历一样，我很少谈论它。对家人或朋友造成的情况太平庸和乏味。我什至不喜欢自己考虑。当陷入下一轮电话或电子邮件中时，我会陷入自我保护的赋格状态，并无声地通过。
Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.
然后，一个晚上在聚会上，一个朋友提到了与航空公司的战斗。她立即试图改变主题。
“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”
她说：“这很无聊。”“漠视。”
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.
相反，我告诉她，我需要听到所有细节。首先，她暂时告诉我有关瑞典的一次家庭旅行，该旅行被库维德（Covid）席卷了。随之而来的是一场旷日持久的战争，涉及拒绝航空公司退款，无法使用的代金券，过期的代金券等。聚会的其他客人开始漂流。一个人讲述了最近的Verizon噩梦。另一个人忍受了Sonos的Kafkaesque技术支持。故事不断来：引诱体育馆的迷宫，Airbnb Hijinks，与许可办公室的不合逻辑对话，与IRS的互动混淆。人们不仅谈到损失的钱，而且还谈到了几个小时，理智，理智可以占上风的基本意义。
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.
这些麻烦和侮辱分别是有趣的轶事。他们一起提出了一些未被关注的东西。每个人都同意：一切都变得越来越糟。在2023年（最近有数据可用的一年），全国客户的愤怒调查显示，美国消费者充满了愤怒。寻求报仇的百分比 - 复兴！ - 他们的麻烦在短短三年内就增加了两倍。
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?
我决定脱颖而出并开始关注。这些接触中心的不可通知实际是故意的吗？（购买新产品或服务肯定是无缝的。）为什么我们经常觉得一切都破裂了？为什么感觉越来越像这种破碎正在打破我们？
Illustration by Timo Lenzen
蒂莫·伦岑（Timo Lenzen）的插图
Turns out there’s a word for it.
事实证明有一个字。
In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.
在2008年最畅销的推动性中，法律学者卡斯·桑斯坦（Cass R. Sunstein）和经济学家理查德·H·塔勒（Richard H.该书的更新版本包括一部分，其中包括他们所谓的“污泥” - 各个行政要求，无休止的等待时间以及妨碍我们生活的程序大惊小怪。
The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.
污泥的整个想法引起了共鸣。在过去的几年中，这个话题吸引了越来越多的工作。研究人员已经表明，污泥如何导致人们放弃基本的好处，并悄悄接受他们从未选择的结果。Sunstein遇到了许多与国土安全部合作的东西，在此之前，作为信息和监管事务办公室的管理员。他在《公爵法律杂志》中写道：“人们可能想签下孩子参加一些有益的计划，例如免费交通或免费的学校用餐，但污泥可能会击败他们。”
The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.
失败的一部分对我来说是黑暗的。当我开始与人们谈论他们的污泥故事时，我注意到几乎所有的方式都以同样的方式结束 - 疲倦，杂乱无章。看到该系统的绝对不负责任性，他们会付出这笔错误的医疗费用或放弃对该票的竞争。这并不是在这里和那里发生的。取而代之的是，我来将其视为永久状况。我们生活在他妈的状态。
Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”
我们提交的一些污泥是不可避免的，这是生活在一个大型数字化世界中的简单结果。但是其中一些是通过设计。Propublica在2023年表明，Cigna如何通过拒绝索赔而没有让医生阅读这些索赔来节省数百万美元，因为知道有限的客户将忍受上诉过程。（Cigna告诉ProPublica，其描述是“不正确的”。）同年晚些时候，消费者金融保护局命令丰田汽车融资的手臂为据称的不当行为支付6000万美元，其中包括挫败退款并故意建立了一个死端热线以取消产品和服务。（现已消失的局在5月取消了该命令。）正如哈佛商业评论的一篇文章所说：“有些公司实际上可能发现为抱怨客户制造麻烦是有利的。”
Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”
污泥还可以减少参与政府计划。据印第安纳理工学院研究和撰写官僚机构的兼职教师斯蒂芬妮·托姆（Stephanie Thum）认为，机构可能会利用这一事实来发挥他们的优势。汤姆告诉我：“如果您将费用放弃或以法律范围而不是普通语言发布网站，那么研究表明人们可能会离开。”“如果您是领导者，您可能会使用这些知识来摆脱行政摩擦，或者将其放置在位。”
Read: How government learned to waste your time
阅读：政府如何学会浪费您的时间
Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.
当然，费用豁免，被拒绝的索赔 - 与其他全球危机相比，欺骗了。但这可能只是它最残酷的技巧。曾经有一段时间，系统性功能障碍会感到大胆和斜体，我们的反应也是如此：我们生气了，我们不再接受它了！现在，更阴险和平凡的事情正在起作用。该系统与它所粉碎一样多，同时让我们放心，这就是事情的发展。
The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.
结果是：我们筋疲力尽，我们可能会继续接受它。
Call Pamela. Call the mechanic. Call the other mechanic. Call that lemon-law lawyer. My exhausted efforts, to the extent I understood them, revolved around getting my car either fixed or replaced and getting the various nodes in the Ford universe to talk with one another. In the middle of work, or dinner, or a kid’s soccer game, I’d peel off to answer a random call, because every now and then it was that one precious update from Ford, informing me that there was no news.
致电Pamela。致电机械师。致电另一个机械师。称那个柠檬法律师。在我理解它们的范围内，我精疲力尽的努力围绕着修复或更换汽车，并在福特宇宙中获得各种节点与彼此交谈。在工作中期，晚餐或孩子的足球比赛中，我会剥去接听一个随机的电话，因为时不时是福特的一份宝贵更新，告诉我没有新闻。
The hope, with all of this, was to burrow my way far enough into the circuitry to locate someone with the authority and inclination to help. Sometimes I got drips of information—the existence of a buyback department at Ford, for instance. Mostly I got nowhere.
希望借助所有这些，将我的方式挖掘到巡回赛中，以找到拥有权威和倾向的人提供帮助的人。有时我会得到信息的滴滴 - 例如，福特的回购部门的存在。大多数情况下，我一无所获。
The longer this dragged on, the more the matrix seemed to glitch. The dealership where I’d bought the car had no record of the salesman who’d sold it to me. Ford’s internal database, at one point, claimed that I had already picked up the car I was still trying to get them to fix. A mechanic told me, “It’s not that we couldn’t fix it. It’s that we never found the problem, so we were unable to fix it.”
拖动的时间越长，矩阵似乎越多。我买的汽车的经销商没有卖给我的推销员的记录。福特的内部数据库曾一度声称我已经拿起了我仍在试图让他们修复的汽车。一位机械师告诉我：“这并不是我们无法修复它。这是我们从未找到问题，因此我们无法修复它。”
Another mechanic, apparently as delighted by our conversations as I was, grew petulant.
另一个机械师，显然对我们的对话感到高兴，变得脾气暴躁。
“Driving is a luxury,” he told me without explanation.
“开车是一种奢侈，”他没有解释告诉我。
Initiating these conversations in the first place: also a luxury, I was learning. For this we have the automatic call distributor to thank. The invention of this device in the mid–20th century allowed for the industrialization of customer service. In lieu of direct contact, calls could be funneled automatically to the next available agent, who would handle each one quickly and methodically.
首先发起这些对话：我也在学习。为此，我们要感谢自动呼叫分销商。该设备在20世纪中叶的发明允许客户服务的工业化。代替直接联系，可以自动将呼叫与下一个可用的代理自动汇合，后者将快速而有条不紊地处理每个代理。
Contact centers became an industry of their own and, with the rise of offshoring in the ’90s, lurched into a new level of productivity—at least from a corporate perspective. Sure, wait times lengthened, pleasantries grew stilted, and sometimes the new accents were hard to understand. But inefficiency had been conquered, or outsourced to the customer, anyway.
接触中心成为了自己的行业，随着90年代离岸外包的兴起，至少从公司的角度来看，它陷入了新的生产力水平。当然，等待时间延长了，愉悦的人变得越来越臭，有时很难理解新的口音。但是，无论如何，效率低下已被征服或外包给客户。
Researching this shift led me to Amas Tenumah. As a college student in Oklahoma, Tenumah had come up with a million-dollar invention: a tool that would translate those agent voices into text, and then convert that text into a digital voice.
研究这一转变使我前往Amas Tenumah。作为俄克拉荷马州的一名大学生，Tenumah提出了一百万美元的发明：将这些代理人的声音转化为文本，然后将该文本转换为数字声音的工具。
“So you’d end up with this robotic conversation,” he told me, “which one could argue may even be worse. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
他告诉我，“所以你最终会进行这次机器人对话，甚至可能会说什么可能更糟。我不知道我在做什么。”
The million dollars didn’t materialize, but connections did. Needing work, he took a telemarketing job at a company called TCIM Services. Rather than transform contact centers, he strapped on a headset and joined one.
一百万美元没有实现，但是联系确实如此。在需要工作时，他在一家名为TCIM Services的公司担任电话销售工作。他没有改变联系中心，而是绑在耳机上并加入了一张耳机。
The obsession with efficiency in his new field astonished him. Going to the bathroom required a code. Breaks were regulated to the minute. Outwardly he worked in an office, but by any measure it was a factory floor. Overly long “handle time”? He’d get dinged. Too few calls answered? He’d get dinged. Too many escalations to a supervisor? Ding. Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them.
在他的新领域的效率痴迷使他感到惊讶。去洗手间需要代码。休息到一分钟。在外部，他在办公室工作，但无论如何，这是工厂的地板。太长的“处理时间”？他会昏昏欲睡。接听电话太少？他会昏昏欲睡。主管的升级太多？丁。表面上看，客户服务的目标是为客户提供服务。通常，它的真正目的是击败他们。
In the two decades after he took that first job, Tenumah rose from agent to manager, ultimately running enormous contact centers around the world. His work took him from Colombia to the Philippines in an endless search for cheap and malleable labor.
在他担任第一笔工作的二十年中，Tenumah从代理商到经理，最终在全球范围内运营着巨大的接触中心。他的工作将他从哥伦比亚带到菲律宾，无休止地寻找便宜且可延展的劳动。
In 2021, he published a slim book titled Waiting for Service: An Insider’s Account of Why Customer Service Is Broken + Tips to Avoid Bad Service. Between calls to Ford and various mechanics, I’d begun reading it, and listening to the podcast that Tenumah co-hosts. He has a funny, straight-shooting manner that somehow lets him dish about his industry while continuing to work in it.
2021年，他出版了一本苗条的书，名为《等待服务：内幕人士关于客户服务的破坏 +提示以避免不良服务的说法》。在福特和各种机械师的电话之间，我开始阅读它，并聆听Tenumah共同主持人的播客。他以一种有趣，直截了当的态度，以某种方式使他在继续工作的同时，让他介绍自己的行业。
When we first spoke, I mentioned that someone at Ford had told me that my case had been closed at my request; I had to go through the whole process of reopening it. Was I imagining things, I asked, or was my lack of progress deliberate?
当我们第一次讲话时，我提到福特的某人告诉我，我的案件已应我的要求结案。我必须经历重新开放的整个过程。我问我是在想象事情，还是缺乏进步？
Tenumah laughed.
Tenumah笑了。
“Yes, sludge is often intentional,” he said. “Of course. The goal is to put as much friction between you and whatever the expensive thing is. So the frontline person is given as limited information and authority as possible. And it’s punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.”
他说：“是的，污泥通常是故意的。”“当然。目标是在您与任何昂贵的事情之间施加尽可能多的摩擦。因此，前线人员的信息和权威尽可能有限。如果他们将您与实际上可以提供帮助的人联系在一起，那将是惩罚性的。”
Helpfulness aside, I mentioned that I frequently felt like I was talking with someone alarmingly indifferent to my plight.
除了帮助之外，我提到我经常觉得自己正在和一个对我的困境漠不关心的人交谈。
“That’s called good training,” Tenumah said. “What you’re hearing is a human successfully smoothed into a corporate algorithm, conditioned to prioritize policy over people. If you leave humans in their natural state, they start to care about people and listen to nuance, and are less likely to follow the policy.”
“这就是良好的训练，”滕纳说。“您所听到的是，人类成功地将其融入了公司算法，以优先考虑政策而不是人。如果您将人类留在他们的自然状态下，他们就会开始关心人们并听取细微差别，并且不太可能遵守该政策。”
For some people, that humanity gets trained out of them. For others, the threat of punishment suppresses it. To keep bosses happy, Tenumah explained, agents develop tricks. If your average handle time is creeping up, hanging up on someone can bring it back down. If you’ve escalated too many times that day, you might “accidentally” transfer a caller back into the queue. Choices higher up the chain also add helpful friction, Tenumah said: Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers leads to poor connection with offshore contact centers; many of the calls disconnect on their own.
对于某些人来说，这种人类受到了训练。对于其他人来说，惩罚的威胁会抑制它。Tenumah解释说，为了让老板开心，代理商会开发技巧。如果您的平均手柄时间正在蔓延，那么挂在某人身上可以将其放回原处。如果您那天升级了太多次，则可能“不小心”将呼叫者转回队列。Tenumah说，链条更高的选择还增加了有用的摩擦：没有雇用足够的代理会导致更长的等待时间，从而淘汰了一定比例的呼叫者。选择便宜的电信载体会导致与海上接触中心的联系差；许多电话会自行断开连接。
“No one says, ‘Let’s do bad service,’” Tenumah told me. “Instead they talk about things like credit percentages”—the number of refunds, rebates, or payouts extended to customers. “My boss would say, ‘We spent a million dollars in credits last month. That needs to come down to 750.’ That number becomes an edict, makes its way down to the agents answering the phones. You just start thinking about what levers you have.”
“没有人说，‘让我们做不好的服务。’“相反，他们谈论了诸如信用百分比之类的事情” - 退款，折扣或支出的数量扩展到客户。“我的老板会说，‘上个月我们花了一百万美元的积分。这需要降至750。’这个数字成为了一个法令，归结于接听电话的代理商。您只需开始思考自己拥有的杠杆即可。”
“Does anyone tell them to pull those levers?” I asked.
“有人告诉他们拉那些杠杆吗？”我问。
“The brilliance of the system is that they don’t have to say it out loud,” Tenumah said. “It’s built into the incentive structure.”
Tenumah说：“系统的才华在于他们不必大声说出来。”“它内置在激励结构中。”
That structure, he said, can be traced to a shift in how companies operate. There was a time when the happiness of existing customers was a sacred metric. CEOs saw the long arc of loyalty as essential to a company’s success. That arc has snapped. Everyone still claims to value customer service, but as the average CEO tenure has shortened, executives have become more focused on delivering quick returns to shareholders and investors. This means prioritizing growth over the satisfaction of customers already on board.
他说，这种结构可以追溯到公司运作方式的转变。曾经有一段时间，现有客户的幸福是一个神圣的指标。首席执行官认为，忠诚度的长期弧度对公司的成功至关重要。那弧已抢购。每个人仍然声称重视客户服务，但是随着普通首席执行官的任期缩短，高管们越来越专注于向股东和投资者提供快速回报。这意味着优先考虑增长，而不是已经在船上的客户满意度。
Customers are part of the problem too, Tenumah added.
Tenumah补充说，客户也是问题的一部分。
“We’ve gotten collectively worse at punishing companies we do business with,” he said. He pointed to a deeply unpopular airline whose most dissatisfied customers return only slightly less often than their most satisfied customers. “We as customers have gotten lazy. I joke that all the people who hate shopping at Walmart are usually complaining from inside Walmart.”
他说：“我们在惩罚与我们开展业务的公司方面的统一变得更糟。”他指出了一家不受欢迎的航空公司，其最不满意的客户的回报频率仅比最满意的客户少一些。“作为顾客，我们变得懒惰。我开玩笑说，所有讨厌沃尔玛购物的人通常都在沃尔玛内部抱怨。”
Read: The death of the smart shopper
阅读：智能购物者的死亡
In other words, he said, companies feel emboldened to treat us however they want.
他说，换句话说，公司感到不愿意对待我们。
“It’s like an abusive relationship. All it takes is a 20 percent–off coupon and you’ll come back.”
“这就像是虐待的关系。只需要20％的优惠券，您会回来的。”
As in any dysfunctional relationship, a glimmer of promise arrived just when I was giving up hope. As mysteriously as she’d vanished, Pamela came back one day, and non-updates began to trickle in: My case was still under review; my patience was appreciated.
就像在任何功能失调的关系中一样，当我放弃希望时，一线希望就会到来。帕梅拉（Pamela）神秘地消失了，有一天回来了，非上升的日子开始流行：我的案子仍在审查中；我的耐心得到了赞赏。
All of this was starting to remind me of something I’d read. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was created in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA. The document was intended to spark a wave of nonviolent citizen resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. “Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions,” advised one passage. “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
所有这些都开始让我想起我读过的东西。简单的破坏现场手册是由CIA的前身战略服务办公室于1944年创建的。该文件旨在激发纳粹占领的欧洲一波非暴力公民抵抗。一段段落建议：“永远不要允许换取捷径以加快决定。”“尽可能频繁地提出无关紧要的问题。”
I’d encountered the manual in the past, and had thought of it as a quirky old curio. Now I saw it anew, as an up-to-the-minute handbook for corporate America. The “purposeful stupidity” once meant to sabotage enemy regimes has been repurposed to frustrate us—weaponized inefficiency in the name of profit. (I later discovered that Slate’s Rebecca Onion had had this same revelation a full decade ago. Nevertheless the sabotage persists.)
过去，我遇到了手册，并认为它是古怪的旧库里奥。现在，我重新看到了它，是美国公司的最新手册。曾经旨在破坏敌人政权的“有目的的愚蠢”已被重新使用以使我们感到沮丧 - 以利润的名义使效率低下。（后来我发现Slate的Rebecca洋葱在整整十年前都有同样的启示。但是，破坏性仍然存在。）
As I waited for news from Ford, I searched for more contact-center agents willing to talk.
当我等待福特的新闻时，我寻找了更多愿意讲话的接触中心代理商。
Rebecca Harris has fielded calls—mainly for telephone-, internet-, and TV-service companies—since 2007. She calls the work “traumatic.”
丽贝卡·哈里斯（Rebecca Harris）在2007年召集了电话，是电话，互联网和电视服务公司。她称这项工作为“创伤性”。
“I’d want to do everything I can to help the person on the other end,” she told me. “But I had to pretend that I can’t, because they don’t want me to escalate the call.”
她告诉我：“我想尽一切可能帮助另一端的人。”“但是我不得不假装自己不能，因为他们不希望我升级电话。”
Many customers called because they were feeling pinched by their bill. For a lot of them, a rebate was available. But between the callers and that rebate, the company had installed an expanse of sludge.
许多顾客之所以打电话，是因为他们感到被账单捏住。对于许多人来说，有回扣。但是在呼叫者和那个折扣之间，该公司安装了一块污泥。
“They would outright tell you in training you’re not allowed to give them a rebate offer unless they ask you about it with specific words,” she said. “If they say they’re paying too much money, you couldn’t mention the rebate. Or if the customer was asking about a higher rebate but you knew there was a lower one, they trained us to redirect them to that one.”
她说：“他们会在训练中直接告诉您，除非他们用特定的话向您询问，否则您不允许他们提供回扣。”“如果他们说自己付了太多钱，您将无法提及回扣。或者，如果客户在询问更高的回扣，但您知道有一个较低的回扣，他们训练我们将他们重定向到那个。”
Harris told me she’d think about her parents in times like this, and would treat her callers the way she’d want them treated. That didn’t go over well with her managers. “They’d call me in constantly to retrain me,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting the numbers they were asking me to meet, so they weren’t meeting their numbers.”
哈里斯（Harris）告诉我，她会在这样的时候想着她的父母，并以她想要对待他们的方式对待她的呼叫者。这与她的经理们相处得不好。她说：“他们会不断地打电话给我来培训我。”“我没有遇到他们要我见面的数字，所以他们没有达到他们的数字。”
Supervisors didn’t tell Harris to deceive or thwart customers. But having them get frustrated and give up was the best way to meet those numbers.
主管没有告诉哈里斯欺骗或挫败客户。但是让他们感到沮丧和放弃是满足这些数字的最佳方法。
Sometimes she’d intentionally drop a call or feign technical trouble: “‘I’m sorry, the call … I can’t … I’m having a hard time hearing y—.’ It was sad. Or sometimes we’d drag out the call enough that they’d get agitated, or say things that got them agitated, and they’d hang up.”
有时她会故意拨打电话或假装的技术麻烦：“对不起，电话……我不能……我很难听到Y-。’这很可悲。或者有时我们会拖出足够的电话，以至于他们会感到烦恼，或者说让他们感到烦躁的事情，他们会挂断电话，他们会挂起来。”
Even if an agent wanted to treat callers more humanely, much of the friction was structural, a longtime contact-center worker named Amayea Maat told me. For one, the different corners of a business were seldom connected, which forced callers to re-explain their problem over and over: more incentive to give up.
即使特工想更具人道的对待，大部分摩擦都是结构性的，一个长期的接触中心工人Amayea Maat告诉我。首先，企业的不同角落很少连接，这迫使呼叫者一遍又一遍地重新解释他们的问题：更具动力放弃。
“And often they make the IVR”—interactive voice response, the automated phone systems we curse at—“really difficult to get through, so you get frustrated and go online.”
“而且常常使IVR成为IVR” - 相互作用的语音响应，我们诅咒的自动电话系统 - “真的很难通过，因此您会感到沮丧并上网。”
She described working with one government agency that programmed its IVR to simply hang up on people who’d been on hold for a certain amount of time.
她描述了与一家政府机构合作，该机构编程了IVR，只是挂断了一定时间被搁置的人。
There’s a moment in Ford’s hold music—an endless loop of demented hotel-lobby cheer—when the composition seems to speed up. By my 8,000th listen I was sure of it: The tempo rose infinitesimally in this one brief spot. Like the fly painted on men’s-room urinals, this imperfection was clearly engineered to focus my attention—and, in so doing, to distract me from the larger absurdity at hand.
福特Hold Music（Hold Music）有一会儿 - 一个无休止的痴呆酒店 - 酒店欢呼声 - 作品似乎加快了。到了我的第8,000次，我确定了这一点：在这个简短的位置，节奏无限地玫瑰无限。就像在男士室的小便池上绘制的苍蝇一样，这种不完美显然是为了集中精力，以使我的注意力集中在我的注意力下，并且这样做是为了分散我的注意力。
Which is to say, my sanity had begun to fray.
也就是说，我的理智开始陷入困境。
When I set out to document the inner workings of sludge, I had in mind the dull architecture of delays and deferrals. But I had started to notice my own inner workings. The aggravation was adding up, and so was the fatigue. Arguing was exhausting. Being transferred to argue with a different person was exhausting. The illogic was exhausting.
当我着手记录污泥的内部运作时，我想到了延迟和延期的沉闷建筑。但是我已经开始注意到自己的内部工作。加重加起来，疲劳也是如此。争辩说是筋疲力尽。被转移到与另一个人争论的人筋疲力尽。不合逻辑的是筋疲力尽。
Individually, the calls and emails were blandly substance-free. But together they spoke clearly: You are powerless. I began to wonder: Was the accretion of these exhaustions complicit in the broader hopelessness we seem to be feeling these days? Were these hassles and frictions not just costing us but warping us with a kind of administrative-spiritual defeatism?
单独的电话和电子邮件平淡无奇。但是他们在一起说话很清楚：您无能为力。我开始怀疑：这些日子似乎在我们似乎感觉到的更广泛的绝望中，这些疲惫的同谋的积聚是吗？这些麻烦和摩擦不仅使我们造成了损失，而且还用一种行政精神的失败主义扭曲了我们吗？
Signs of that warping seem to be appearing more and more, as when a Utah man who says he was denied a refund for his apparently defective Subaru crashed the car through the dealership’s door. But most of us wearily combat sludge through the proper channels, however hopeless it seems. A Nebraska man spent two years trying to change the apparently computer-generated name given to his daughter, Unakite Thirteen Hotel, after a bureaucratic error involving her birth certificate. She also hadn’t received a Social Security number—without which she couldn’t receive Medicaid and other services.
这种扭曲的迹象似乎越来越出现，就像一个犹他州男子说他被拒绝退款，因为他看似有缺陷的斯巴鲁（Subaru）将汽车撞到了经销店的门上。但是，我们大多数人都疲倦地通过适当的渠道对抗污泥，但似乎没有希望。一名内布拉斯加州男子花了两年时间试图更改涉及出生证明的官僚错误，在官僚错误的错误之后，给女儿Unakite 13 Hotel赋予了明显的计算机生成的名字。她还没有收到社会保险号，而她无法获得医疗补助和其他服务。
In his 2021 follow-up to Nudge, Sludge, Sunstein notes that this constellation of frictions “makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter.” I asked Sunstein about this depletion. “Suppose that people spend hours on the phone, waiting for help from the Social Security Administration, or seeking to get a license or a permit to do something,” he replied. “They might start to despair, not only because of all that wasted time but because they are being treated as if they just don’t count.”
在他2021年的推动，污泥的后续行动中，Sunstein指出，这一摩擦的星座“使人们感到自己的时间无关紧要。在极端情况下，它使人们感到自己的生活并不重要。”我问了Sunstein关于这种耗竭的信息。他回答说：“假设人们在电话上花费数小时，等待社会保障局的帮助，或者寻求获得许可证或许可证来做某事。”“他们可能开始绝望，不仅是因为所有浪费的时间，而且因为他们被视为不算在内。”
For Pamela Herd, a social-policy professor at the University of Michigan, sludge became personal when she began navigating services for her daughter, who has a disability. “It’s one thing when I get frustrated at the DMV,” she told me. “It’s another thing when you’re in a position where your kid’s life might be on the line, or your kid’s access to health insurance, or your access to food.”
对于密歇根大学的社会政策教授帕梅拉·赫德（Pamela Herd）来说，污泥开始为女儿提供残疾的女儿服务时变得个人化。她告诉我：“当我对DMV感到沮丧时，这是一回事。”“当您处在孩子的生活中，或者孩子获得健康保险或获得食物的机会时，这是另一回事。”
In 2018, Herd published Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, with her husband, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Michigan. The book examines how bureaucratic quicksand—complex paperwork, confusing procedures—actively stymies policy and access to government services. Rather than mere inefficiencies, the authors argue, a number of these obstacles are deliberate policy tools that discourage participation in programs such as Medicaid, keep people from voting, and limit access to social welfare. Marginalized communities are hit disproportionately.
2018年，牛群出版了行政负担：其他方式与她的丈夫唐纳德·莫伊尼汉（Donald Moynihan），密歇根州的公共政策教授唐纳德·莫尼汉（Donald Moynihan）。该书探讨了官僚主义的Quicksand如何（复杂的文书工作，令人困惑的程序）如何严格地阻碍政策和获得政府服务的访问。作者认为，这些障碍不是仅仅效率低下，而是故意的政策工具，不鼓励参与医疗补助，使人们投票并限制获得社会福利的计划。边缘化社区的打击不成比例。
Throughout my ordeal, it was always clear that I was among the fortunate sludgees. I had the time and flexibility to fight in the first place—to wait on hold, to write follow-up emails. Most people would’ve just agreed to start driving the damn car again. Fuck it.
在我的整个磨难中，总是很明显我是幸运的污泥。我有时间和灵活性首先要战斗 - 等待搁置，写下后续电子邮件。大多数人会同意再次开始驾驶该死的汽车。操它。
One of sludge’s most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions, Herd told me. Once that skepticism sets in, it’s not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency. She was on speakerphone as she told me this, driving through the Southwest on vacation with Moynihan. As it happened, something had flown up and hit their windshield just before our conversation, and they were surely headed for a protracted discussion between their rental-car company and their insurance company—a little sludge of their own.
赫尔德告诉我，污泥最阴险的效果之一就是我们对机构的信任。一旦怀疑，像埃隆·马斯克这样的人以效率为幌子就不难将政府态度。当她告诉我这件事时，她正在使用扬声器，与Moynihan一起度假。碰巧的是，在我们谈话之前，某事已经飞来飞去并撞到了他们的挡风玻璃，他们肯定会在租赁汽车公司和他们的保险公司之间进行了持久的讨论，这是他们自己的一小部分污泥。
Exasperated as we all are, said Tenumah, the customer-service expert, things are going to get much worse when customer service is fully managed by AI. And, as Moynihan observed, DOGE has already taken our frustration with government inefficiency and perverted it into drastic cuts that also will only further complicate our lives.
客户服务专家Tenumah表示，当客户服务完全由AI管理时，情况将会变得更糟。而且，正如Moynihan所观察到的那样，Doge已经使我们对政府效率低下的沮丧感到沮丧，并将其变成急剧的削减，这也只会使我们的生活更加复杂。
But in some corners of academia and government, pushback to sludge is mounting. Regulations like the FTC’s “Click to Cancel” rule seek to eliminate barriers to canceling subscriptions and memberships. And the International Sludge Academy, a new initiative from both the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the government of New South Wales, has promoted the adoption of “sludge audits” around the world. The business research firm Gartner predicts that “the right to talk to a human” will be EU law by 2028.
但是，在学术界和政府的某些角落，污泥的推翻正在越来越大。FTC的“点击取消”规则之类的法规寻求消除取消订阅和会员资格的障碍。国际污泥学院是总部位于巴黎的经济合作与发展组织和新南威尔士州政府的一项新倡议，促进了世界各地的“污泥审计”。商业研究公司Gartner预测，“与人交谈的权利”将于2028年成为欧盟法律。
In the meantime, I’ve developed my own way of responding.
同时，我发展了自己的回应方式。
Years before my Ford ordeal, I’d already begun to understand that sludge was doing something to us. It first registered when I noticed a new vein of excuse in the RSVP sphere: “Sorry, love to, but I need to figure out our passport application tonight.” “Sorry, researching new insurance plans.”
在我的福特磨难之前的几年，我已经开始了解污泥对我们有所作为。当我注意到RSVP领域的新借口时，它首先注册了：“对不起，爱，但我需要今晚弄清楚我们的护照申请。”“对不起，研究新的保险计划。”
The domestic tasks weren’t new; the novelty was all the ways we were drowning in the basic administration of our own lives. I didn’t have a solution. But I had an idea for addressing it. I fired off an email to some friends, and on a Tuesday night, a tradition began.
家庭任务并不是什么新鲜事；新颖的是我们在自己的生活基本管理中淹没的所有方式。我没有解决方案。但是我有一个解决问题的想法。我向一些朋友发了一封电子邮件，在星期二晚上，传统开始了。
“Admin Night” isn’t a party. It isn’t laborious taking-care-of-business. It’s both! At the appointed hour, friends come over with beer and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, summer-camp paperwork. Five minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, rinse, repeat. At the end of each gathering, everyone names a minor bureaucratic victory and the group lets out a supportive cheer.
“管理之夜”不是聚会。这不是费力的企业。两者都是！在被指定的小时，朋友们带着啤酒和有争议的指控文件夹过期，到期里程，夏季文书工作。五分钟的chitchat，半小时安静的管理员，冲洗，重复。在每个聚会结束时，每个人都为小官僚主义的胜利命名，并且该团体给予支持。
Admin Night rules. In an era of fraying social ties, it claws back a sliver of hang time. Part of the appeal is simply being able to socialize while plowing through the to-do list—a 21st-century efficiency fetish if ever there was one. But just as satisfying is having this species of modern enervation brought into the light. Learning of sludge’s existence, Thum, the bureaucracy researcher, told me, is the first step in fighting it, and in pushing back against the despair it provokes.
管理夜规则。在一个陷入社会关系的时代，它缩回了悬挂时间。上诉的一部分只是能够在耕作待办事项清单的同时社交 - 如果有的话，这是21世纪的效率恋物癖。但是，让这种现代化物种带入了光线。官僚研究人员告诉我，了解污泥的存在，是与之抗争的第一步，也是反对它引起的绝望的第一步。
Among sludge’s mysteries is how it can suddenly clear. With no explanation, Pamela called one day to tell me that Ford had decided to buy back my car. She put me in touch with the Reacquired Vehicles Headquarters. From there I was connected to a “repurchase coordinator,” then I was told to wait for another process in “Quality,” and after some haggling over the price they agreed to buy the car back. To Ford’s credit, they gave me a fair offer. But I would’ve accepted a turkey sandwich at that point.
在污泥的谜团中，它如何突然清除。没有任何解释，帕梅拉（Pamela）有一天打电话告诉我，福特决定回购我的车。她让我与重复的车辆总部保持联系。从那里，我与“回购协调员”联系起来，然后被告知要等待“质量”的另一个过程，并在他们同意购买汽车的价格上付出了一些讨价还价之后。为了获得福特的荣誉，他们给了我一个公平的报价。但是那时我会接受火鸡三明治。
What happens to the car next? I asked. I was told that if returned vehicles could be repaired, they could be resold with disclosures. But was Ford obligated to fix the defect before selling it? No one could give me a clear answer. I pondered options for warning potential buyers. Could I post something to Yelp and hope it somehow got noticed? Hide a note inside the car somewhere? Publish the Vehicle Identification Number—1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474—in a national magazine?
接下来的汽车会怎样？我问。有人告诉我，如果可以修理返回的车辆，则可以通过披露转售。但是福特是否有义务在出售缺陷之前修复该缺陷？没有人能给我一个明确的答案。我考虑了警告潜在买家的选择。我可以向Yelp发布一些东西，并希望它以某种方式注意到吗？在车内藏有音符？在国家杂志上发布车辆识别编号-1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474-？
Before I could decide on a solution, I got the call. One hundred eight days after this whole thing began, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove to the San Jose dealership where my Escape had been waiting all this time. When I arrived, a man named Dennis greeted me and we walked to the lot where the car was sitting. I grabbed everything out of the center console, and then we walked back inside.
在决定解决方案之前，我接到了电话。整个事情开始后一百八天，我借了一个朋友的汽车，开车去了圣何塞经销店，在那里我一直在等待。当我到达时，一个叫丹尼斯的男人向我打招呼，我们走到了汽车坐的地方。我把所有东西都拿出了中央控制台，然后我们回到里面。
“What’s going to happen to it?” I asked. “Are they going to resell it?”
“这会发生什么？”我问。“他们要转售吗？”
Dennis didn’t know, or didn’t seem inclined to discuss. (A Ford communications director named Mike Levine later told The Atlantic that the company does not resell any repurchased vehicles that can’t be fully repaired. Given the confusion I witnessed, I still wonder how they confirm that a car is fully repaired.) I signed some papers, and it was over. The car that wasn’t safe to drive, the process that seemed designed not to work—the whole experience ended not with a bang but with a cashier’s check and a wordless handshake.
丹尼斯不知道，或者似乎不愿意讨论。（福特通讯总监迈克·莱文（Mike Levine）后来告诉大西洋，该公司没有转售任何回购的车辆，这些车辆无法完全修复。鉴于我目睹的混乱，我仍然想知道他们是如何确认汽车已完全维修的。）我签署了一些文件，而且已经结束了。行驶不安全的汽车，似乎是为无法使用的过程 - 整个体验不是爆炸，而是带有收银员的支票和无话可说的握手。
When I originally alerted Ford about this article, a spokesperson named Maria told me that my case was not typical and that she was sorry about it. Regarding all the back-and-forth, she said, “that was not seamless.” Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford. He said that the teams I spoke with had needed time to see whether they could replicate the problem with my car, though to my mind that suggests a more concerted effort than what I perceived.
当我最初向福特提醒这篇文章时，一位名叫Maria的发言人告诉我，我的案子不是典型的，她为此感到难过。关于所有来回的人，她说：“那不是无缝的。”莱文告诉大西洋，福特不会“鼓励或衡量'污泥”，“零目的是为了在我与福特的互动中添加'污泥'。他说，我与之交谈的团队需要时间来看看他们是否可以用我的汽车复制问题，尽管在我看来，这表明比我所感知的要付出更多的努力。
Pamela emailed an apology, too, adding that, given “the experience you had with your vehicle, I do want to extend an offer for a maintenance plan for your vehicle should you decide to purchase a Ford again, as a complimentary gift for your patience with the brand, as I understand this process took a long time.”
帕梅拉（Pamela）也向道歉发送了电子邮件，并补充说：“考虑到您对车辆的经验，如果您决定再次购买福特，我确实想扩展为您的车辆维护计划的报价，因为我了解这一过程花了很长时间。”
We did purchase another vehicle, but it wasn’t a Ford.
我们确实购买了另一辆车，但这不是福特。
Lately I’ve taken to noticing small victories in the war against sludge. That Nebraska dad with the daughter named Unakite Thirteen Hotel? I’m happy to report she was at last given a Social Security number in February, and was on her way to finally, officially, becoming Caroline.
最近，我注意到了针对污泥的战争中的小胜利。那个内布拉斯加州的爸爸和女儿的名叫Unakite 13 Hotel？我很高兴地报告说，她终于在2月获得了一个社会保险号，并正式正式成为卡罗琳。
Still, I couldn’t help thinking of all the time her dad lost in that soul-sucking battle.
尽管如此，我忍不住想着她父亲在那场吸引力的战斗中输了。
“It’s been very, very taxing,” he said in an interview.
他在接受采访时说：“这是非常非常非常征税的。”
I understood his frustration.
我理解他的挫败感。
