Uber effectively doesn't have customer service--or at least it hasn't for the past few years. You can no longer simply "call" and the out-of-app email is a chatbot ouroboros straight out of dystopian fiction. Think Gilliam's Brazil, but worse.
After a few failed Uber pick-ups and one instance of a mysterious 27% post-ride "corridor fee", my policy moving forward was to simply no longer do business as a paying customer with any business that doesn't have actual customer support.
This meant, among other things, migrating off of Google, a few brokerage accounts, and one national bank.
Doing a "support test" is also now one of the very first things I do as a new customer of any company.
So far, I have zero regrets. In a perverse way, I give Uber credit for providing the impetus for those decisions.
> email is a chatbot ouroboros straight out of dystopian fiction
Hold on there. The chatbot may be dystopian, but an ouroboros is never dystopian. An ouroboros represents cyclicality, unity, or the eternal return, but not in a dystopian context of meaninglessness. An ouroboros is meant to grant a grand perspective, not to be a well of misery.
From a historic mythical standpoint, you're absolutely correct.
I was using it as a topological (I guess technically graph-theoretic) metaphor for the self-consuming looping that was/is Uber's email support system.
Over the course of 36+ hours, multiple "support agents" kept re-quoting either my responses or their own responses as "the newest escalation". It was hilarious and also sad. I just ended up doing a charge-back on the card.
After a few failed Uber pick-ups and one instance of a mysterious 27% post-ride "corridor fee", my policy moving forward was to simply no longer do business as a paying customer with any business that doesn't have actual customer support.
This meant, among other things, migrating off of Google, a few brokerage accounts, and one national bank.
Doing a "support test" is also now one of the very first things I do as a new customer of any company.
So far, I have zero regrets. In a perverse way, I give Uber credit for providing the impetus for those decisions.