Before following the various US/Western hegemony-defending conflicts became a large task when done properly, we’d occasionally quiz readers on the condition of their economy, meaning personal, local and industry indicators. These queries provided informative sightings that would check the accuracy of official statistics and storylines.
It should have occurred to me a long time ago to make regular inquiries about new or worsening incidents of crapification. Admittedly, this deterioration may be so pervasive that collecting anecdata may not provide the hoped-for insight.
My experience may not be at all representative, but based on my last trip to the US six months ago versus the one just finished, there seems to be an increase in the rate of decay in the US.
We’ve said the US is on a path similar to that of Russia in the 1990s, of institutional breakdown and elite looting an a scale that immiserated huge swathes of the population. More widespread and severe crapification is a part of that trajectory.
Pens have become a pet crapification indicator of mine. In Southeast Asia, pens are not freebies in banks. The ones sold in retail stores are very cheap and not very good. They’ll often skip even after scribbling a bit to get the ink going. So we have a low baseline but (as far as I can tell) no deterioration from that.
Thus one of my small missions on this trip was to buy or otherwise obtain a few decent pens. I failed. I bought some mid-range ones (rollerball, not my preferred type, but I am told they are more tamper-resistant when writing checks) at CVS and then at Staples when the CVS ones skipped. The Staples ones were a fail too.
My chiropractor has freebie ballpoints, very nice looking and in the past well performing. This time, hers skipped too. Ditto the ones in the hotel. So either the entire category has gone downhill or I have a pen curse.
I do have a technology curse (confirmed by both Lambert and our tech maven Dave) and it was fully operative on this trip. One of my indulgences is to hire a tech person, whose corporate persona is Nerd Girl, to come and do a bunch of device housekeeping and resolve problems. The next two shaggy dogs stories relate to her last set of visits.
Torture by Microsoft refusing to make a sale. My copy of Word and Excel had stopped working, in that I could access them only in “read only” mode as of about six weeks ago. We had been able to buy (not license, buy) the Microsoft Office suite a few years back; there was no apparent reason why access had suddenly been downgraded on copies I had purportedly purchased. The big reason for me to have Word is to be able to copy documents with footnotes; the Apple analogue Pages will not do that.
Nerd Girl determined that reviving my current copy was probably a Mission Impossible. But she did figure out that again buying Word + Excel (or the Office suite) was still possible, even though Microsoft did not make that obvious.
We spent over three hours and were unable to complete the desired purchases.
I have two laptops and one regular task is for her to copy my recent data off my woking laptop onto the current non-working laptop so that becomes the working laptop. Nerd Girl started with the laptop set to be swapped out, on the erroneous assumption that a license purchase would be valid for three devices as before.
Even this first purchase took over an hour and considerable assistance from a helpful and competent Microsoft person. Microsoft rejected my first credit card without attempting to put the charge through to my card issuer. It took a ridiculous amount of effort to get a second card accepted. Nerd Girl inquired as to how to get the license on the second laptop and was told that could be done but only by removing it from the machine on which it had been installed first. That seemed OK if cumbersome.
The next day, Nerd Girl was unable to do that even when using the Microsoft removal tool. So we resigned ourselves to buying a second copy.
We spend over two hours on that and could not make it happen.
Microsoft this time rejected both of the cards I use for business.
It was torture to get a human. The voice interactions shunted us to a product category that was totally irrelevant to the situation. When Nerd Girl called again, she was immediately routed to that dead end. We had to call from three additional phone numbers to work out how to bypass Microsoft deciding it knew what we were up to based on the earlier misinterpreted AI interactions.
The first human was not much of an improvement. She said she would need to put in a ticket to fix our problem. We said that was not true, we’d had the same problem yesterday and the support staffer was able to get it fixed. We asked for a supervisor. She was pissy and pretended to comply. After some time on hold, she said she could get the tech who had helped us the day before to call. We went along despite our skepticism.
He actually did call after 10 minutes. But this time, we got only more run-around.
Multiple tries at the workaround he had used the day before were a bust. He then suggested that I use PayPal (not on because reasons) or (I am not making this up) buy a Microsoft gift card at Amazon, deposit it to my account, and use that for the purchase. The only logic I could see here was to make sure I bought the product not via a credit card, where I would have chargeback rights, but via an irrevocable payment method. But even if so, how did the first purchase manage to slip through?
But there were no Microsoft gift cards on Amazon, only Xbox. He said that would work but this sounded way too failure prone, particularly given the history thus far.
We then wasted time at Best Buy, which also sold these products. But Best Buy remembered that I had accounts which I had not used in a decade. It would not let me purchase as “guest”. Nor did it provide for password reset.
Virtually all this time, a Microsoft tech person was on the line. How much did denying my small purchase cost them? What corporate purpose could this gaslighting possibly serve?
Citibank personal account mini-debacle. Another was to get me set with a Citibank app so I could make transfers from my account under their new more stringent process:
Now to another time sink. I had wanted to get this set up while in the US:
Some of you may be thinking, “Why does this require assistance? It’s just downloading an app.”
BWAHAHA.
So Nerd Girl did get the app. We then tried making it work.
We got error messages.
She tried rebooting the app, then reinstalling it, and reboooting the phone and the laptop. No change in outcome.
The message with the error cade said to call a particular number.
After getting bounced around and put two times through an authentication process, we reached a theoretically relevant human.
But the human said I had to call a different number, she could not handle my account type.
At this point I was ready to break china.
The next day, I marched into the branch of my account rep. It took 50 minutes to resolve the problem. The front line staffer who met me could not fix it and had to take me to a higher-up who was, after some effort, able to. They were both very calm and reassuring, so at least they tried offering some emotional balm to compensate for the hassle.1
Citibank corporate account ongoing debacle. In contrast with the merely aggravating new account access procedure above, I have had a real problem on the business side of Citi. In November through December 2026, I had over 50 mystery debits on my corporate checking account, including 35 that reversed out all of the check deposits made on one day in October. Citi sent letters on 33 of the 35 check reversals, which merely the debits were due to an error and had a long code.
Citi had pressed us to use a scanner, which Our Man in Brooklyn attempted but gave up on due to persistent jamming with his first and only 10 checks. So at most 10 of the 35 reversals could have been justified as duplicate deposits.
I easily spent 30 hours on this on the phone on my own and got nowhere. The phone reps did not recognize the code in the letters or the notations in my transaction history. They were clearly not able to get to Cash Management, which presumably could cough up the backup. I then got a banker who was acting as my account rep (long story as to why I did not then have a formally designated one) to act. We spent another four hours on the phone and got nowhere.
On my April visit to New York, I went into a branch that handles my type of personal account and got a rep to try to sort this out. She spent 2.5 hours on the phone and was getting nowhere. The branch manager stepped out, asked why she had been (by implication wasting her time) with me for so long. She explained. He said, “Why didn’t you escalate?” and said if I sent him the info, he would be back to me within a week.
Here I goofed. I mistyped his e-mail address. The e-mail did not bounce back. It took me two months to realize my error. I then sent missives to the right address as well as leaving follow-up voicemails.
No response.
I had tried complaining to the New York Department of Financial Services. I had managed to get though to a fraud unit and left a voicemail, expecting nothing to happen.
A “Frank” called me within two hours. He listed to my story and agreed that a bank taking money from my deposits with no explanation sure sounded like fraud. He took down some preliminary information, gave me a case number, and said an investigator would call.
That did not happen. I followed up after a month and then at two week intervals. I was sent to voicemails where I left messages with the case ID.
I finally got a person who was mystified as to what “Frank” had done and said I should file a complaint. This seemed like weak tea but I had no other recourse. He also suggested I complain to the CFPB and FBI (!!!!).
However, the NYDFS sent a letter to Citi in two days. This was ~ two months ago.
I had still heard nothing so I decided to pay another visit to the branch manager who said he would Do Something.
It took two attempts to catch him but on the second, he was out on the floor the branch. I said, “You are the person I want to see.” He said he had gotten a report on my issues at 4:11 PM the day before. He said it had also been hard to get anywhere, that he had been bounced around to units who would twist his inquiry into something completely different. He mentioned that I had filed a complaint.
I scanned the documents and said they was not complete, that it addressed only some of the 35 check debits (they had found and provided backup that 10 were duplicate deposits).
He told me to send him what was still outstanding, that now that he had figured out where to go within the bank, it should be a lot easier to get the open items resolved.
Hotel crapification. My regular hotel, a Sonesta that I have gone to for years, has also gone downhill. It was an Affinia property when I first started going there. When Sonesta bought it a few years back, there did not seem to be much change in operations, save ending the ability of guests to control the temperature for me (an unpleasant development since I like warm). That ended with this visit.
There is only one daily set of flights that gets me into JFK without a terrible layover. It is an AM arrival when check-in is 4 PM. However, they have always let me into a room when one has been cleaned and good to go, generally at worst by 1 PM.
This time, when I asked for an early check-in, I got a frosty response. And they did not let me check in before 4 PM.
And I was sick as a dog when I arrived, so it is not as if I had the energy to go get lunch at a nearby spot or check my bags and busy myself by running errands or even just strolling about. I was desperate to get horizontal.
When I finally was allowed to check, the staff went through the ritual of handing me a sheet of paper listing all the bennies I got as a Platinum member….including early check in.
My fancy membership tier was supposed to include free “high speed” WiFi. Mind you, before this visit, regular WiFi had been free for all guests and only the “high speed” option was subject to a daily charge. Now even the basic was tolled.
I tried signing in using my member ID and it was rejected. So I had to sign up as a paying user and repeatedly go to the front desk to make sure the charges were removed.
Note also I had elected for “high speed” to help Nerd Girl with her work, since she had complained before that the hotel WiFi was so slow as to make downloads difficult. She ran a speed test to show that “high speed” was still very slow, with worse download speeds than on her phone’s hotspot.
In general, the front desk staff was frazzled. There were often long lines. I have been there before when the hotel was fully sold out and never saw anything like that. My guess is Sonesta had cut staffing.
But it may also be due to new busywork, like having to reverse out unwarranted WiFi and deal with other bad new gimmicks. I nearly always have the front desk print out a few documents for me. This time, they all had the back side taken up with “Sonesta Hotels” at the top and a big multicolor zodiac filling the rest of the page. It looked as if the staff had mistakenly printed out a ton of these pages and then tried to minimize the error by printing on the blank side.
Needless to say, just about everything I was printing was for a business use, so this looked extremely unprofessional.
I asked the staff what this was about.
They said this was a new corporate branding initiative and they were required to print out documents this way unless the guest asked for the documents to be printed on plain paper.
And there were new grifts, like working out that T-Mobile has been subjecting me to “Your T-Mobile balance is low” messages, which they once did when it really was low. They have started doing that when there is plenty of money in the account. I worked that only by accident, after putting more in as a result of one of these warnings, getting a second mere days later when I had barely used the phone, and find out I had hundreds of dollars in credit.
I know these all sound like high-class problems, as in of someone who can afford to hire help to handle some duties and free up time for me to use elsewhere. But I am hardly alone in behaving some or even a lot of time like that. The fact that what ought to be simple tasks are now becoming tar babies that get even professionals stuck is a very bad sign. At a minimum, they are productivity sinks that also confirm distrust in what passes for leadership. This sort of incompetent tech and procedure design and implementation undermines competitiveness and institutional functioning. The cult of St. Luigi may spread well beyond the health insurance arena.
Forgive me for being so long-winded. It may have seemed self-indulgent to some, but I thought there was value in being granular in showing that persistent effort was at best only partly effective, and that giving detail might encourage other victims to pipe up.
Readers, have you seen an increase in crapification, either in the frequency of incidents or their severity? If things do seem to be getting worse, it would be helpful to know how, and if you have any theories, why.
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1 This is a new labor indignity, that customer-facing staffers have to engage in emotional labor when the bosses fail to clean up known or expected problems. And as companies cut corners, even more relationship remediation falls on them.
