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What is a business/org that's so terrible no one should use if possible?
BMO Bank of Montreal. Im speechless over how incompetent they are. (Canada)
Nestle. Because they're evil.
Others?
Edit:
See also the positive inverse of this post: What is a business/org that is great and ethical in so many aspects that everyone should consider using?
For the last 11 years, I have said (and continue to stand by): I will have no internet before I ever have Comcast Internet again. The service wasn't even that bad, it was the wild billing practices, and dealing with them every month, for months on end.
It got to the point where I was using an app to record my phone calls with them. I called in one time about a tech coming out for a service issue on their side of the pole. They assured me I would not be charged a fee for rolling a tech.
The next month rolls around, and I have two tech roll out fees (the tech only came once). I called them back, ended up getting a supervisor, and I played them back the recorded phone call where the person I spoke to said I would not be charged, let alone charged twice. The supervisor told me that it was what it was, and that the same as I would be expected to pay my check at a restaurant, I would be expected to pay this bill.
Ended up filing a complaint with my secretary of State, which got someone from Comcast corporate to call, and fix those fees. After that phone call, I called the main number back immediately after, to cancel my service.
I recently ended my service with them. I called to cancel about a month before I was moving just so I'd have all my ducks in a row when I closed on my house. They took the opportunity to charge me an extra $14 on my last bill just because. This is after they already charged me $30 extra a month while on their service for the privilege of me using my own modem and router instead of their bullshit. Never again, fuck those guys.
Edit: I think the $30 a month was a surcharge to not have a data cap while using your own modem. If you use their modem, you bypass the data cap for free. But I paid it because I was frequently over the data cap and they charge you an arm and a leg for going over.
...What? Been stranded with Comcast most of my adult life and they only ever charged exporbitant fees to use theirs.
Course wouldn't shock me. Few organizations are as beuracratically evil as Comcast.
Yeah, where I am, at least, it's currently free to use their modem/router combo and they charge you extra if you want to use your own. It's actually ridiculous, but I paid for it because I didn't want their equipment in my home, not that they wouldn't have other ways to spy on my traffic if they wanted to.
Their plans feel crafted to take advantage of those less well-versed technically, too. In my area the “gigabit” service they sell is something like 1g down/10m up, which would be fine for Netflix and such but will fall apart as soon as you try to do video calls or anything with any significant data upload.
Thankfully a local competitor sells symmetrical gigabit fiber for about the same price, which is what I use instead.
A lot of times the limitations have to do with the existing infrastructure. If you browse the FCC Broadband map you'll see that some neighborhoods have access to 15 Mb up while others have 40 Mb even within the same city and both neighborhoods are using copper wire. Not all neighborhoods have the same age of equipment, topology, or the same quality of wire. So the low upload speed that is common in the US is not as much an artifact of business greed as it is about technical debt
On the other hand, the taxpayers have funded infrastructure upgrades intended to fix that technical debt several times over across a couple of decades and had the money repeatedly pocketed by the telcos, who also spend huge amounts protecting their near-monopoly status and suddenly find the ability to invest in upgrades only when absolutely forced to face competition in a given market. So that technical debt is absolutely an artefact of business greed.
To be clear, US taxpayers gave countless billions of dollars to deploy universal broadband, but after rapidly rolling out the bare minimum requirement to the most profitable areas, the telecoms said "thanks for the cash, but it won't be profitable to service all the people you paid to get serviced, get bent."
As a result, Comcast's annual profit is almost $50 billion dollars today, but there are still huge gaps in their service area. Enough to fund 2 NASAs. Pretty sure they can afford to replace all of that legacy with symetrical fiber direct to every home inside a decade. And stop demanding that unserved customers fund the initial cost of the line run.
And they're not the only provider.
Yep. To support your comment, symmetrical internet on CATV's inherent issue is both how they use the spectrum and the limitations of DOCSIS. (My knowledge of HFC/CATV is 11 years old so some of this could be wrong)
Cable providers were given the 5-1000 MHz from the FCC. DOCSIS in North America divides this into "channels" of 6MHz, so about 160 channels. Most of the time, 5-50MHz was used for upload, and the rest was used for download OR analog TV channels. DOCSIS 3.0 allowed providers to bond those channels together to boost throughput for both download and upload, but only 4-8 channels for upload and up to 32 for download. This is changing with DOCSIS 4.0 rollouts (completely different multiplexing), so theoretically CATV providers will be able to do symmetrical Gig at somepoint.
The day I got fiber and was able to leave Comcast in the dust was amazing. The fiber's twice as fast for half the cost. No hidden fees, no caps, no fee for the router, cancelling can be done in-browser, and the website doesn't try to upsell you on every other click. It's amazing.
My current home was only serviced my Spectrum (coax), Comcast (coax), and AT&T (ADSL) when we moved in. So I went with Spectrum. Which was.. fine. But after 5 years AT&T laid fiber in the whole neighborhood, I signed up for day zero activation. Calling to cancel Spectrum went like this:
goose: Hi, I'd like to cancel my service with Spectrum, please.
Spectrum: Ok. Well let me see what kind of a discount I can get you.
goose: No thanks, I'm not looking for a discount, just want to cancel
Spectrum: Oh, usually it's people just wanting a discount. You don't need internet anymore? Did we do something?
goose: No, you've been fine. But I can get Fiber now. So I'm going with that.
Spectrum: Oooooooh, fiber. Okay. Alright. Well I'll see you on the other side when you come back.
goose: What? Well, it's 4x faster download speed, and 30x faster upload, for $20 less than what I pay y'all.
Spectrum: Yeah, but I'm telling you, that fiber isn't all it's cracked up to be. Our product is better. You'll be back.
goose: ........I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
To her credit, she didn't push back any more, she cancelled my service without any surprises. That was about 2 years ago, haven't looked back since!
How delightfully arrogant, you've got to respect it somehow.
Fun fact: You can opt to have the fiber terminate with ethernet at the box and avoid the need for a modem at all.
I still miss FioS, worst part about my move was losing it. Now I pay more for less. I blame Verizon for stopping their FioS rollout.
Fios under both Vz and later Frontier gave me an endlessly hard time trying to get them to terminate at the ONT and not use their crappy "modem". I had already wired my whole home for ethernet, and I was more than capable of the trivial physical task at my home. I just needed them to handle the administrative side on the account. Verizon straight up refused and kept moving goal posts about how I'd need a different more expensive account, a new contract, etc. Every time I said "OK, let's do it" they'd change the requirement. Frontier was just so incompetent from a customer service perspective that every time I talked to them about account changes they'd accidentally cut off my service. I ended up staying on a legacy outdated plan because they couldn't figure out how to change it without cutting off my service. The actual service was bulletproof though, and so I stayed until I moved and now I am stuck with shitty Comcast until some fiber provider stops intentionally going around my area.
We went without internet in our apt for 2 years for all these reasons. I was living close to downtown so there were coffee shops for when I needed internet for an hour or whatever, and I had T-Mobile phone service, so wasn’t a big loss. I never used tethering or anything, so practically speaking it was just no gaming, no streaming, no TV, which is broadly a good thing.
Comcast is terrible.
I've been using Comcast Business service at my home for maybe eight years now. It used to be amazing - first line tech support was someone knowledgeable and helpful and friendly in the US. When I bought my house around that time I was having connectivity problems, so they sent a crew out to replace the coax from the pole to my house (maybe 150' of very rough terrain) at no charge. You do have to sign an SLA with them, and it's quite expensive - I'm paying about $150/mo for the "performance" plan, which is something like 300 down/30 up, with my own modem and router. But there's no caps hard or soft, I get a routable public IPv4 address, and running servers isn't against the TOS.
But, the last few years it's gone down the tubes. Maybe once a year I have connectivity problems and they have to send out techs to do something on the repeater(?) box on the line next to my pole. Their phone support is now outsourced, your standard crummy phone support experience. And randomly each month since the start of this year I've been getting paper invoices that they're charging me for, even though ebills are turned on in my account. Called them up and they refunded the money I'd paid and said they fixed the problem, but I'm still getting paper bills and getting charged for them, need to call them back.
There's supposed to be a local fiber ISP coming to my address Soon™️, so I may jump ship if I don't move first. For anyone in a similar situation where you must have good fixed-line internet, I'd still recommend Comcast Business, but now unfortunately with heavy reservations.
I mean, I pay Comcast $100 for 300/20 and I don't get an SLA of any kind. I just get corporate speak for "Whatta you gonna do? Pay $150/mo for slower DSL?"
Well the SLA cuts both ways - I'm locked in to a two year contract. But when there's an outage I usually get a small refund, there are no uptime guarantees.
I didn't realize that consumer Comcast had gotten so expensive.
It depends on the market. I pay $40 for 200/40.
Very much so. When I had the choice between 2 cable internet providers and fios, prices never topped $75 for gig internet.
Thank goodness for public bodies that have ruling over companies. I got money back from one of the cell phone tri-oploies because of CRTC1 once, and our prices would be even more ludicrous without them.
1 - Canadian Radio-TV Telecommunications Commission
It took me over a week to get internet from them because of the stupid script. I kept telling them there was no wire coming into my house, they kept having me restart my modem. When they finally sent a tech out, he said, “Oh, there’s no wire coming to this house.” He didn’t have the stuff to hook me up and so had to set new up a new appointment, where I finally got service.
Their customer service has gotten better to a point. I now get texts when there’s a known outage, they even tell me when it’s expected to be over. Still, I get a third of the speed I’m paying for unless I check on and complain once in a while. They then do something to magically fix it.
From what I understand, the company that the city has a contract with has constant outages. I really wish I wasn’t in a fiber dead zone.
I really hate to say a single word of support for a company like Comcast, but here we go I guess.
I had to choose Internet for my apartment around 5 years ago. Options in the area were crappy AT&T dsl or Comcast. My parents had so many problems with AT&T that I decided on Comcast despite the many horror stories online. To my surprise, they haven’t actually been that bad in my experience. There was no yearly commitment or cancellation fees. Setup and cancellation were easy and quick. The prices I signed up for were fixed prices, so they didn’t increase after 1 or 2 years, unlike AT&T. They can actually provide the advertised speeds, unlike AT&T. I haven’t had to have a tech come out a single time. The only communication I get from them is an email about once a year saying they bumped my speed profiles (usually to slightly increase upload speed). The only annoyance I have is that maximum upload speed is like 40mbps even with a 1200mbps download speed. Even 100 up would be awesome, but preferably more like 250-300.
This is compared to the dog shit that is AT&T. Once we finally got them to enable a bonded pair, we could get a max speed of 50mbps down and 8 up. Really fantastic for the modern internet. And it couldn’t even provide that reliably. The internet and TV were so unstable that we had to downgrade to 25/4 service just so the internet would work. The slower speed costs the same price, and I had to argue with sales for a while to get them to switch to a slower speed. The faster speed would overload their provided modem and cause it to start dropping packets. Calling a tech out to fix the lines was a bimonthly job, and required having support do their troubleshooting checklist before they would send someone. The only good thing I can say about AT&T internet is that their techs never charged us a service fee because the issue was always their infrastructure.
In comparison, Comcast is a company I don’t even think about since it mostly just works with very few outages. Not a single issue in years. I am sure this is dependent on region, but I have no issues with Comcast in my area.
Your story reminded me of our experiences with AT&T. We had them for many years and our internet could get spotty at times, but for years it was mostly fine. Then one day in college (maybe after we got some new equipment from them...?), it suddenly became just awful. Connection would drop regularly on my PS4 when watching videos forcing me to test the internet connection to forcibly reconnect it, there were constant connection errors on a mobile game I played to the point I'd regularly turn off WiFi and use data...
It was massively annoying, but my parents never experienced the worst of it themselves since they didn't really do anything requiring a constantly active connection like that. (Well, dad streamed Netflix and HBO but somehow he never had problems, so I guess it just didn't like my PS4?) At one point we did test out a different modem or router from them, but that one was even worse to the point my mom actively experienced problems on her laptop. So we swapped back to the old one, and I just gave up because while annoying, at least it wasn't causing critical issues.
The last straw was a big service outage right before Christmas that lasted for days. It was lucky it was during a period where we didn't need to worry about work or classes, but it still sucked for obvious reasons. My parents finally agreed to switch to Metronet and swap the cable for Youtube TV, and we still use that to this day. On that note, Metronet is amazing and I highly recommend it if it's an option.
The thing that gets me though is my mom later told me our house was right on the edge of the area AT&T supported. By which I mean our neighbors across the street who also had AT&T couldn't get WiFi in their kitchen because that part of the house was outside the support zone. We weren't in a rural or remote area, either, we were in a very nice subdivision with many more houses in that direction, so... Yeah. In retrospect that explains a lot. They didn't tell us that when we first contracted with them, and I think they shouldn't have even offered it to our houses at all. Especially our neighbors who, again, only had PART of their house in the supported area.
My SO used to work at one of their call centers (or their main one? I dunno)... and seriously, he hated it (but was great at not being a crap human being and helping people who actually needed it, and also harassing the Karens and jackholes who'd call in). Then he got fired and didn't mention it to me. I asked him 2 days later if everything was okay, because he seemed exponentially happier than he had in the previous ~2 years he worked there... told me he got fired and while suddenly we lost half our income, there's nothing better than having your SO's mental health improve so much.
That being said, we lost our HBO and a ton of other stuff, and suddenly had to pay out the arse for our internet, but that was like 8 years ago and now we use someone completely different, and yes, Comcast can go to hell.
I nearly didn't sign the lease for my current place when I thought that Comcast was the only option for an ISP. Comcast had a monopoly on service in my parents' area for a number of years and they were a pain to deal with. AT&T came and liberated us (though they're not much better haha)
Facebook, what with the enabling fascism (e.g., Cambridge Analytica) and the enabling genocide (e.g., Myanmar) and the rampant misuse of AI (e.g., fake profiles and faking AI chatbots of celebrities) and the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is buying up huge swathes of Hawaii specifically to make a "fuck you I got mine" bunker.
Don't forget about running a hidden server in Android apps and recording web usage from sites using FB elements.
For anyone interested in Facebook role in Myanmar genocide of Rohingya people, here's something to read (may be disturbing/harmful [damn my English] for very emotional people), it has few parts, this is part 1: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
Also https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks-role-in-myanmar-and-ethiopia-under-new-scrutiny
And finally I recommend reading book „Careless People„ - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
I read Erin Kissane's writeup of the situation a while back, it's as well written as it is absolutely horrifying. It's worth the read but it's definitely very emotionally charged.
It really blows me away that so many of my activist friends and acquaintance still use it and shrug it all off.
It makes me quite angry if I'm being honest
Personally, blows my mind people still use twitter. It's never been good, it never will be good, and using it to complain about Musk is probably the crowning summary of the modern age in my eyes.
I get it if it's a part of your job, but dear god the number of people I've met/know who are ready to "Eat the rich" but can't drop twitter because "reasons" is just nuts.
This is of course easy for me to say because i've stayed the hell away from twitter since the start, and found all its imitators to fail at the same fundamental level (focus on attention not discussion and views not content), but the excuses I've heard while justifying using a platform by a man they identify as a Nazi makes me very very jaded.
I deleted Twitter for good in late 2023 as a New Year's resolution for 2024. Best decision ever. I also deleted Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok at that time. I have not felt the need to return nor missed out on anything important. It's almost all mindless garbage. It's almost all just aggregating and promoting the worst of humanity.
I wish I could stop using FB but that's how people in Atlantic Canada do anything here. The county or library or community center websites for example is not updated, just FB. My kid's extracurricular, all FB.
Also in Atlantic Canada, can confirm. I've at least been able to get away with not having it on my phone and just logging in via browser if I do need to look at something, but it's unfortunate how many things still rely on it. My town posts more about local events and happenings on Facebook than on their own website, it's pretty sad to think about.
My partner doesn't have his own account, and though he's perfectly happy with that decision, he does find it annoying that he gets left in the dark so much due to that.
The stickiness of the service is frustrating. There’s entire fields (many which are full of left-leaning folks) who can’t or won’t drop it for some reason or another.
Surprisingly artists are among those groups. I don’t know why, but almost none of the alternative services have taken root for that crowd. The closest is probably ArtStation, but it had a bit of a PR disaster with poor handling of AI imagery that cheesed a lot of people off.
I hate it because one of the best uses of social media in my opinion is as a gallery of the beautiful images everybody is drawing/painting/shooting/rendering, which is almost the polar opposite of doomscrolling. I just wish they’d post their stuff somewhere else.
Yeah i mean clearly that's almost as bad as someone everyone thinks is a Nazi running the platform....
To be clear not trying to be snide to you or anything, i just find this whole thing sooooooo frustrating. It is, to me, a perfect example of how much people's talk means jack shit. If you can't boycott a platform run by what you believe to be a literal nazi, then how can we take anything you say as serious if the slightest inconvenience is all it'll take for you to continue to use their product.
I have a friend with horrific anxiety issues who I spent years trying to get to leave Twitter because it was actively and obviously harming their mental health. The main reason they resisted so long was that it's the best platform for animators and artists. They're trying to get into the animation industry, and they said Twitter was the best option for networking because that's where all the professionals are.
I think there's basically a never-ending cycle where people would join Twitter to network, expanding the networking opportunities there and making other sites even more sparse in comparison. That, and it has a big art scene which is invaluable for artists with commissions.
On that note, I'm personally not sure if a dedicated art platform would be quite as successful and lucrative for artists. People typically join social media sites to share content, track specific content creators or socialize with others. So until an art site becomes heavily mainstream, I think that would limit people who would be interested in joining to those with an existing interest in art or a specific artist on said platform.
People join sites like Twitter for a multitude of reasons though, so art posted there can be spread to a wider audience who wouldn't typically go out of their way to look for art. Someone can join to track some news from their favorite bands, and end up commissioning an artist they never would have heard of after a friend retweeted one of their pieces. An all-purpose site is just really good for exposure.
I can relate. I have no idea why I made an account since I'd only really visit a single profile (literally never went to the front page), and never got sucked into it. At this point I hang onto it solely to be able to view tweets relating to articles or current events.
Unfortunately, some people use Twitter as their primary online platform, so I have to occasionally check it if I want proper context on something linked in an article or discussion. This also extends to companies. Sometimes their Twitter feeds will have more up-to-date information on time-sensitive issues than... Anything else, really.
I mean in the rare case I NEED something from twitter I still try to use things like https://nitter.net
Oh, it's back up then? I used to use that (or some other project called "Nitter") but it went down for ages. Thanks for the link!
I don't think it ever fully went down. I use the XCancel browser plugin/extension, which I think just uses Nitter, and I've never had a problem reading Tweets when I need to.
I never used an extension, but I know the main site went down so I decided to do a quick search to refresh my memory. The "main" instance/site for Nitter went down in January 2024 due to Twitter API changes, while some other private and public instances remained online. I remember either visiting or being redirected to the Github page for the main project to see most of the public instances were offline, and discussion about how it was unlikely to return due to the API changes. Trying to find a working instance back then was annoying, I think the ones that did work felt very tedious to use for casual stuff so I just dropped it.
So I'm glad to see the site is back!
Nitter is back and future development is once again planned, but as mentioned in the link it's now more difficult and expensive to host a large public instance. There are still a few to choose from if one is having issues or just to split up your traffic.
I hesitate to go for the obvious villain, but UnitedHealthcare and frankly, everything that falls under the United Health umbrella should be shunned if at all possible. I won't post every link that proves my point, but I strongly suspect that if Luigi Mangione hadn't come along, I'd still be struggling.
Case in point: Autoimmune disease destroyed my hip joints. Spouse's Humana insurance got medical review of the x-rays done within a few days and approved the first surgery immediately. A year later, on UHC insurance, surgery for the opposite hip (even more deteriorated) was held in review for two months, during which they mandated physical therapy.
The PT looked at the surgeon's report and x-rays, told me nothing could be done for the hip but replacement because the cartilage was already gone. So he worked on my shoulders and wrists instead. Meanwhile, it took the surgeon three hour-long medical review calls with UHC's claims deniers to get approval. [I know it's not unusual for hip replacements to take months or years in other countries. But I also had a rheumatologist weighing in that the debris from the hip deterioration was making everything else worse, including things like kidney and lung function that would be even more expensive to fix.]. Yes, this is the same company that tried to use its proprietary AI to justify a 90% claims denial rate for rehab.
Anyone who's had to go on the pharmaceutical odyssey for disease management will tell you about the hoops they've had to jump through to get insurance approval for the drugs that work. It took me trials of eight different ineffective and/or toxic drugs mandated by UHC before UHC finally approved biologics. I'd like those years of my life back, please.
To make matters worse, UHC's pharmacy benefit management arm, Optum Rx, has engaged in deliberate inflation of biosimilar drug pricing to nearly brand-name prices.
I have to work with staff from UHC's healthcare IT outsourcing arm, Optum Insight, on a regular basis. I just can't even... they're the least capable, most inefficient, bill-the-customer-by-the-hour sorry bunch of inept losers.
Aside from my personal animus towards UHC, this is very much a story about what private health insurance means in the U.S. Better than nothing at all, but not by much.
That's fucking terrible, fuck those scumbags. Are you saying that it's gotten better since Luigi's act of heroism?
As I recall (I'm on mobile and can't easily cite my source, but I am in industry and track these things as part of my job) UnitedHealth coincidentally pushed through more approvals, specifically appeals, post the murder of their CEO.
Since my previous statement wasn't political: one billionaire per year should keep industrious CEOs working for the common man, since we seem uninterested in passing legislation to help.
All I know is that UHC suddenly dropped the prior authorization requirement for biologics, which was delaying the treatment the rheumatologist had been recommending for two years of UHC-mandated step therapy.
I'm now doing great, almost complete remission with a Humira biosimilar. UHC also dropped the requirement for periodic reauthorization so I can continue taking it without fear of discontinuation, as long as it keeps working. Still got two extra years of joint damage, a weight gain from steroid treatments that I'm still struggling to lose, and some permanent deformities in my hands, but modern medicine works miracles if you can afford it.
Great video essay about that: Healthcare of the Rich and Famous.
No wonder you have politicians defending our healthcare system as the best in the world. They get access to VIP treatment in emergency care and can have concierge doctors.
Forgot to mention that yet another arm of the United Health conglomerate leaked the PHI of 190 million Americans to a ransomware gang last year. Change Healthcare processes half of all medical claims in the U.S.
Collateral damage included millions of prescriptions unfilled for weeks, and claims payments withheld from providers, clinics, and hospitals for months. Some went bankrupt as a result. UHC is now extorting practices that haven't yet been able to repay bridge loans UHC provided until claims payments could resume (see HIPAA Journal article linked above).
UHC is another vertically integrated oligopoly that ought to be broken up and sold for parts, but I'm not holding my breath.
Maybe self-payer prices would even be more reasonable if there was no insurance for anyone...
I don't think any "the market will take care of itself without artificial price supports and regulation" solution applies to healthcare, particularly in the U.S.
So many people are already paying out of pocket, either from lack of insurance or restricted provider networks... With no ability to negotiate fees and drug costs, they often wind up paying substantially more than those in insurance plans or health maintenance organizations with broad networks.
Neither my PCP nor my rheumatologist (nor my spouse's PCP and cardiologist) are in-network, so I'm paying up to the out-of-pocket maximum every year. When I look at how little insurance reimburses for basic preventative care on my Explanation of Benefits statements, it's a wonder any providers participate at all.
Other countries somehow manage single-payer or regulated insurance systems at less than half U.S. costs, with better outcomes.
Healthcare should never have been allowed to be for profit. It’s in the insurance company’s best interest to deny claims and in the pharmaceuticals companys’ best interest to keep us sick.
To agree with and add to what you said, even in a truly free market, we would need regulation to control healthcare costs. Because the downside for the person seeking care is either their quality of life or that life itself, the demand curve is nearly infinite. That means the patient is basically held hostage to the medical system.
In a world where medical care was part of the community it served, social pressure and a strong sense of mission functioned to control the possibility for rampant profit. Now that everything is a "medical system", the policy makers are freed from that social pressure (except for extreme cases). In fact, they can leverage that social pressure to begin to squeeze the providers to work for less money or to work more hours because they still feel that sense of obligation and mission.
The only answer I see to limit the rampant profiteering of late stage capitalism is either regulation or some other form of control as wisely pointed out by @Regulation.
Maybe we should just do away with being permitted to negotiate healthcare at all. Everybody pays the Medicare rate. That rate could go down since we wouldn't be subsidizing the insurance companies that browbeat doctors below it.
Santander bank. Banks are, in my experience, pretty much all awful but Santander takes it to another level. I have many reasons why. Here are just three:
They let a fraudulent insurance company set up a direct debit, without my knowledge or permission, and empty our account. We got the money back because.. well, it was their fault. Shit happens, no worries, carry on. Except... this happened for four consecutive months. I was repeatedly told there was nothing they could do. I suggested perhaps disabling direct debits might be a solution but computer says no. Could they require the account holder's permission, maybe? Also no.
They wouldn't let me pay a cheque into my account. They wanted ID. I had the card for the bank account, my driving license, my passport, several proofs of address including correspondence from Santander, but that wasn't enough (note: I bought a house the same year with less ID than that). The cheque was for £50 and was from HMRC (UK tax office) and on their official paper, watermarked. They couldn't tell me what crime they were stopping me from committing by this.
After I finally closed my accounts, which took hours of phone calls and several trees worth of paperwork, I started getting paper bank statements in the post. I phoned up to query this and eventually someone admitted that sometimes, when you open an account, they open a matching "shadow" account in case you need more accounts later. Why they can't just open more accounts when you need more accounts, I'm not sure. However, due to me not being a customer any more, I couldn't access "my" account because I'd been deleted from the system and as such couldn't pass their security checks. At that point I put the phone down. Being a business account, it costs a few pounds a month to keep running. As far as I know it's still accruing charges, but I have a letter from Santander confirming I'm no longer a customer and all my accounts are closed so they can get in the fucking sea.
This sounds a lot like what Wells Fargo did.
EDIT: I now see that @Akir mentioned the same thing in another comment.
I am now using the phrase “they can get in the sea” as the alternative to “go pound sand,” “kick rocks,” or “shove it.” Big appreciation to you.
What ID did they want?
They were not clear on what they actually wanted. In the end I went with the approach of getting increasingly furious in a busy bank and at some point it became less trouble for them to pay the cheque in than it was to continue having a loud, angry customer holding up the rest of their customers. I don't like doing that but sometimes it does work.
... And that was how you deviously deposited £50 into a stranger's account, completing your diabolically evil and illegal plan. Right?
What the feck. That's the most horrendously incompetent bank I've ever heard of. And they were very wrong about the Direct Debit - you're covered by DD guarantee, so they should raise an immediate indemnity claim for any fraudulent DDs and refund all payments fully to you without issue. They must offer some poor staff training.
That's pretty terrifying and where I think my BMO adventures are headed, unfortunately. Gonna make a note to self to get confirmation in writing the account is locked. Thanks, and I hope that's the last you'll hear from them.
The only reason I know to get everything in writing is that it's not the first time that's happened to me. Nat West once didn't close an account I asked them to close and left a live direct debit on it. When they eventually managed to get in touch with me I was hundreds of pounds overdrawn with even more in bank charges.
Since then, everything in writing, every time.
I noticed that you said a business account. May I ask which bank you use for a UK business account now and how you'd rate them?
I don't currently have need of a business account but a few years ago I moved all my personal banking to Nationwide and they're the least bad bank I've used so I'd definitely look at them if I needed business banking again.
I've worked with, or been a customer of, almost every one of the UK high street banks and incompetence is kind of standard across the industry.
Personally I've switched to using "challenger" banks wherever possible, for over 5 years now and it's been comparatively great. My general rule is if they have a physical branch somewhere they are to be avoided if possible.
Anecdotally my partner and I both opened new current accounts at the same time a few years back. She went with Nationwide as there is a branch within 10mins walk of our house. I went with Starling, who don't have branches at all. My account was open in about 30mins, fully security cleared and active within 8 hours and my physical cards arrived in the post within 48 hours. I took Nationwide over 10 days and multiple physical visits to do the same.
Yup. Every bank I've ever used has been bad, but Santander are the worst. I'm fully prepared to believe stories like mine about every other bank though. It's like energy companies - they all suck but some suck more than others.
What I like about Nationwide is they are a building society rather than a bank. So I will tolerate a certain amount of incompetence in return for that. Occasionally they give me money because profit sharing and so on.
Physical branches have advantages sometimes. Once a year when I need a bag of pound coins or to deposit a cheque or cash.
Oracle
If you have "Director" or above in your title plan on getting harassed at some point by an Oracle sales rep. The sales will also use near bribery-style tactics with leadership to get them to purchase software. The software is absurdly expensive and they will try to lock you into their products.
Fork Yeah! the Rise and Development of Illumos
(It's a talk by a guy who worked at Sun (which was bought out by Oracle), and how Oracle shitcanned Solaris, and how that lead to the community fork Illumos.)
Side note: Any talk on any topic by Bryan Cantrill is worth watching. The energy, the word choice, the presentation, and of course the content is all just top notch. Some of his lightning talks (and full presentations) from the old Surge conference are particularly great.
Oracle is the devil. They're like the vampires of the tech world; they exist primarilly to drain large companies of their bank accounts, and I'm convinced they've only grown so large entirely because of acquisitions and litigation.
I actually haven't heard anything about them in the past few years. That might just be because I'm not really in that market segment anymore, but I'd like to think that Larry Ellison is too busy trying to purchase the rest of Hawaii.
Oracle got to where it was because it beat the pants off every other non-IBM database product from about 1980 something until around 2008 or so. That made them th affordable option.
Doubly so with the introduction of RAC in 2001. Best I can tell, it still is the one of the best options if you need full ACID compliance and horizontal scaling.
That said, I'm also fairly certain that the number of organizations that think they need that is much greater than the number that do.
I do still agree that they're much like vampires.
Let's be honest, Oracle was never the "affordable option", they just had an admittedly better database. IBM's system is just so legacy that it is extremely painful to work with and has comparable costs to Oracle.
I actually spent a great many years working with IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft, and other database systems (at the same time) and Oracle was the best of them as long as you had the knowledge and tools to get the most out of it. We also paid eye watering sums of money for it. As much disdain as I have for Microsoft, their products are probably better for all but the largest enterprises these days, but that certainly was not the case in the past.
These days I am happy to to work for a smaller company and mostly use PostgreSQL. It reminds me a lot of Oracle in a good way and the cost of licensing is nil.
I've really been curious about giving EDB a spin. Being able to almost immediately drop in-place from Oracle to postgres is huge.
I actually used that for a while for working on local/small/experimental stuff that I didn't want to have to possibly justify like if I had gone right to one of the RAC clusters. Now, it has been a good 7-8 years since i did so, but the majority of the differences that I recall were just syntax and datatype changes over standard postgres so that I could more or less use the same scheme scripts. It wasn't fully 1:1, but it was really close. I ended up switching to straight postgres a year or so after because I didn't like being behind on some versions of postgres proper and some of the improvements of those versions were quite significant at the time.
I had no issues with EDB, but eventually you still need to know the differences between the two to get the most out of them, so other than maybe a softer stepping stone it isn't likely hugely important to most people. That being said, I have no idea what EDB have added in the last near decade, and they may bring a lot more to the table now.
Much of the software is also really, really bad.
Absolutely. I have no idea why most companies choose to use it.
Sorry for the double posting, but I figured the other one I wrote was meaty enough that it deserved it's own thing.
I guess I'm what the young people are calling "crunchy" to an extent; my sister has once described me as a modern day hippie. And so I'm going to say some things that are unpopular.
Probably the most controversial of these is that I would put almost every major food brand on the list. There was a time when you could say that something like your grandmother's fried chicken was "addictive" and it was just an exaggeration to say that it was good. But now a lot of modern foodstuff is literally formulated to be addictive. I would count things like the ultraprocessed stuff that is the majority of products in the grocery store, but also most restaurant chain food as well. The stuff they sell is not "poison" exactly, and the effects it have are subtle, but they have some terrible effects; food addiction has killed two members of my family due to complications relating to metabolic syndrome (i.e. obesity), and it has dramatically affected the health of both me and my sister.
I also won't do business with any meat or dairy producers. There's an ethical and moral arguement to make that I won't bore you with. The reason why I gave them up was my health, but other reasons why I'd suggest people follow suit is that the industry is killing the planet and also doing horrible things to people. Though honestly, the biggest reason why I avoid them these days is just that they have become really gross to me.
I think payday loans are scams that pray on the poor, but at least they have a degree of legal regulation. There are now fintech apps that give you the same basic concept but are skirting legislation because they are somehow "not loans", and yet they still somehow have APRs that can be 300% or greater. I hear they are paying wage slave corporations to put advertising posters next to their "know your worker rights" posters. Honestly, every fintech that exists to skirt laws should be on this list. And frankly, that's every fintech you've ever heard of.
Another scam on the poor to mention is rent-to-own businesses, which will end up costing you more than what it would cost if you just put it on a credit card and did minimum payments.
What companies I would like to be able to stop doing business with are Microsoft and Google. I don't think I need to explain to the Tildes audience why. Apple only really "wins" for me because they're less obviously evil (and honestly, their hardware has tempted me to the dark side).
There's a ton of businesses that I would love to see legally murdered and their business practices outlawed, but there's no way for any of us to actually touch them because they operate entirely in the B2B space. Credit reporting agencies, advertising, data aggregators. On the top of my list are companies like RealPage and Palantir.
As a small business owner, I could tell Yelp to go into the sea for all I care, but they’ll still call me from some random local number which is from an overseas call center to “talk to me about my ad.” Eat a nice big bag of infested oysters you cheese clowns.
Yep has my business hours as open 24/7 and I get angry customers who think our physical store should be open at whenever time they show up.
Of course our website, Google, fb, automated attendant all state the correct times.
Of course Yelp requires a paid account to make changes to info they made up.
Dairy Queen.
Around five years ago I had two coupons from some local fundraiser. One was for buy one get one free Blizzard. One was for a buy one get one free Royal Treat.
I attempted to use either (or both) of them to order a buy one get one free Royal Blizzard, which was like a Blizzard with extra toppings or something. They claimed that a Royal Blizzard qualified as neither a Royal Treat nor a Blizzard and would not honor either coupon. I have not and will not step on any property occupied by them since.
Super Wash (car wash franchise)
They ran a radio commercial around 13 years ago that had an ambulance siren in it, causing several occasions of distracted driving trying to find and react to the source of the siren only to realize that it was on the radio.
I'm not sure I'd fault DQ for that one, exactly. You had two coupons for two different products and asked to use one or both on a third product, which (at least in Canada) isn't really how they work. Which isn't to say necessarily that it's not a customer service failure for a manager to not ok the deal, but at least as written I wouldn't have expected that to work.
That being said, DQ is drastically overpriced for what it is. Every time I've gone there in the last 10 years I've come away wondering why I go there in the first place (but then I eat the ice cream and become less disgruntled).
You can burn with them then!
If it makes you feel any better, the Royal Blizzard is just a blizzard with a hot fudge core in the centre, which usually melts half the ice cream and kind of ruins the experience. I think you're better off this way, in the end.
The content of the food is not the concern. The concern is with the concept of a [adjective] Blizzard not qualifying as a Blizzard, despite being in the Blizzard section of the menu separated in the same way that a "candy creation" or "signature creation" are.
https://www.dairyqueen.com/en-us/menu/treats/blizzard-treats/
https://i.imgur.com/R26Y1Wl.png
I have never felt such a kinship over something so mundane. terr might be technically correct, but I swear I'll murder them in a DQ parking lot on your behalf. (Obviously, I wouldn't murder them, as murder is neither Royal or a Blizzard)
Seconding that one for 76 gas. That was my only commercial on Pandora for like 2 years and it drove me up the wall. No 76 gas, ever!
I tried to use a "$1 off Blizzard or Royal Treat" coupon that was from a grocery store receipt which was located on the same block and had the Dairy Queen location's address printed on it, and it was rejected. Was not given any sort of explanation. So I have a similar grudge.
I grew up living about two blocks from a dairy queen. We went there a lot, because ... 2 blocks but there was also a sonic and a Whataburger. Once in high school, one of the staff was extremely rude to me, so I refused to go there after that. About three months later, there was a fire and it went out of business. Felt like karma.
Ooof I think your DQ might be a bad franchisee one off, hopefully. My local ones would take a weeks old un-redeemed meal sundae receipt no problem, and upgrade the kids meal cone to a dipcone / confetti cone at no charge
Damn I love Dairy Queen. I don't think I could boycott them even for that.
Aw man, a DQ chicken strip basket is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine because somehow, the ones they make on the other side of the country in 2025 are identical to those made at the DQ in my hometown back in the 90s. It’s one of those rare cases where the memories and current reality magically line up.
Super Wash is actually a pretty decent automatic carwash place, though; at least for the one near me. I feel their machine does a pretty decent job, but the icing on the cake for me is that they have self-detailing bays that are stocked with clean, moist towels so you can make your car wash perfect. I don't actually go there often, though, because they're relatively far from me. But they're also the best option for automatic car washes in my area for some reason. Oh, and I also don't wash my car often to begin with.
Actually, there's a new gas station one that just opened on the other side of the block from me that's pretty decent. They'll probably be getting my money from now on.
I'll take your BMO and raise you literally every single major bank. At least in the United States (BMO counts, they're down here now too), though I would be surprised if things aren't the same across the globe.
There is not a single one that is not the cause of new legislation for how shitty and anticonsumer they are. Remember overdraft fees - you know, when they charged you money for not having enough money in your account? And they had the absolute gall to try to tell us that they were doing us a favor for it. Some banks were so brazenly morally bankrupt that they would actually reorganize the order transactions were counted specifically to maximize the number of overdraft fees that they charged you. I've actually got class action lawsuit checks from a number of banks that have done things that were brazenly illegal even at the time they were happening, most notably Wells Fargo who opened new bank accounts under my name without my permission or concent and then later with an auto loan overcharged me for interest (though to be fair, I'm not sure if that one was a class action suit).
Even when they aren't doing morally and legally dubious actions, their banking products are kind of predatory. I just looked up what you have to have in a Chase checking account in order to avoid having to pay an absurd $15 fee for the pleasure of giving them your money, and it's $1500. I know that may not seem like a lot of money to you, but there's a great number of people on this planet who couldn't even dream of having that much at once.
But the icing on the cake is that they're actually indirectly responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gasses being emitted on this planet. The major banks are quite literally bankrolling the vast majority of oil and gas production projects. They will greenwash like all hell - you might even see some of them saying that they're going to invest to make them a net-zero emitter - but that doesn't really mean anything if they're paying for massive oil rigs and the massive environmental damage they cause. But I'll admit this is kind of unfair; It's not like if they didn't fund those projects, they wouldn't be done. Someone else would fund them.
I’m pretty sure the little local bank in my hometown pulled the transaction rearrangement bit on me a few times back when I was a nearly broke teen and young adult. It’s one of those things that disproportionately impacts those with the least capacity to deal with it.
Every bank is bad, sure, but I've never had to experience the BMO level of incompetence before. TD, Royal, CIBC, National, Scotia, Bank of China Canada, HSBC not even as bad. And that's saying something because HSBC is pure evil, they made my family take an international flight to resolve something that should be just a phone call. Greed, malice and anti-humanist is norm I expect. I did not expect BMO level of incompetence.
Conversation yesterday, 3 different agents, same script.
Me: I want to check on the status of the credit card application
Them: what's the CC number?
Me: it's an application, I don't have the card yet.
Them: okay let's authenticate you another way. How much merchant refund in past 30 days is on this CC?
Me: I don't have the card yet. Zero.
Them: okay, then how much cash advance in the last 14 days.
Me: I don't have the card yet. Zero.
Them: okay what's the amount of the last transaction?
I don't have the card yet. Zero.
Them: thank you, you've been authenticated, what's your question?
Among other forms of sheer incompetence. Thankfully, an old Reddit post indicated that all I need is the airline CC account created for the Porter air perks, I don't actually need to USE the card for the flights. Booked. Card will forever remain locked and I'll get it in writing.
Unless you're fine with the yearly fee for the card, you may want to spend $15,000 / year with it:
https://www.bmo.com/assets/pdfs/edb-premium-cc-rebate-en.pdf
I was going to switch from the aeroplan card (air Canada) to this as my main, but after this experience I'm happy to pay full price and not deal with them at all. It's so sad to me as a Canadian that we have so few choices; air Canada decided to join WestJet in charging carryon as well as checked bag. I just checked, one round trip with my travel companion is $228 extra for carry on that even their fancy $600 fee metal card won't waive. Personal item size just isn't enough for a work laptop and change of clothes. It's tragic.
Any strong opinions on Schwab? I've been using them for a while and have actually been pretty happy with them. The biggest reasons are that the customer service number is always straight to a live person, and the website is pretty good. But I don't know much about them behind the scenes.
Schwab has been pretty great for me. I only use them for my secondary checking+debit card account, plus a brokerage. Not daily banking.
But the debit card is absurdly powerful. No foreign transaction fees, best daily rate foreign conversion, and all ATM fees fully refunded at the end of the month, no matter what network it’s in.
Essentially I can walk up to an ATM anywhere on the planet, pull out local currency, and get the daily rate with no fees. Unbeatable for travel. The account is completely free with no minimum balance or deposits required.
In terms of customer service, I recently goofed and forgot to move more money to that account before arriving in another country. I called customer service from the customs line, and asked them to expedite the 3 day deposit review (in place for fraud prevention). Agent had the deposit go through next morning. A+ agents who are actually enabled to solve problems.
Considering moving the rest of my banking to them. Would recommend you give it a try. It’s free :)
I hate to glow about a bank (because, you know...) but that matches my experience. I use ATMs without giving it a thought, and any time I've had a time sensitive emergency they've been there to deal with it quickly and call me back when it's done. "Enabled to solve problems" is apt. I can tell when I'm talking to them that they're used to solving problems and not being yelled at.
Same here. Always excellent customer service (been with them for nearly 15 years). They even sent us a housewarming gift when we ordered a cashiers check for our house down payment.
Well, hang on a sec. Isn't the overdraft feature ("feature") something you sign up for? i.e. not on accounts by default
It is now, but for many years it was poorly described and opt-out.
The threat of government regulation has forced banks to clean up their act though, and I hope that will stay despite the Trump whiplash on this regulation
That's due to a new regulation. Overdraft protection (by drawing from a credit card or other savings accoun) was actually an improvement of the bad old days where banks would just plop doen $35 fees for every debit transaction you made if your paycheck landed a day late.
It was not uncommon to rack up $200 in fees for overdrafting by $40 because you went to the mall the day after your paycheck was supposed to have been deposited.
Optus is a telecommunications provider in Australia. They’ve fucked up a number of times in recent years, but there’s one in particular that stands out in my mind.
Many years ago, I was with Virgin Mobile, who used Optus as their carrier but Virgin handled my account information and just piggybacked off the Optus network for their customers.
When they announced that they were closing down operations in Australia, they offered a pretty decent deal to switch to Optus, so I took them up on it. While it was still the same network, so I was generally happy with my coverage, their customer support was much much worse and their plans were noticeably more expensive than the switch-over deal, so after a year or two I left them and went to another competitor. When I left, I made sure to confirm my account was completely closed and deleted (for as much as that word means anything anymore)
Many years after I left, Optus emailed me with the sadly fairly standard “we’re sorry that we got hacked but don’t worry, your account is not compromised” email that I’m used to seeing. Only, I happened to know that my account is the least of my worries with that particular security breach...
They made national news for being hacked, but rather than the usual “oops our username/password database was stolen so you need to change your password now” this one was much worse — this one was “for some reason we still had a copy of your full ID (multiple forms) saved on our servers, and the hackers stole a copy now, so they can do full identity theft and basically open credit cards under your name etc”
Our version of DMV had to literally change the way drivers licence ID numbers work across the board, and reissue a new licence to every affected customer (and former-customer!!!), because otherwise the hackers (and anyone who they later sold the details to on the black market) had enough forms of ID that they could open bank accounts/credit cards/etc under your name if you were impacted.
So yeah, if you ever see a drivers licence from Victoria, Australia (and maybe some other states, I wasn’t paying attention to the rest of the country at that time) and see the extra digits on the back of the card, know that the only reason they exist is because Optus fucked up a security breach so badly that they caused the licence issuer to add a new security feature to literally everyone’s licences.
No one started off with Google? The fact that you cannot have a non-Apple phone and not have their grubby paws in them? Also skewing all internet anything for decades now? Can't even enjoy free videos on YouTube, because Google? You can't even do a decent internet search without Google affecting it (and yay for Bing, but ugh MS and honestly it sucks)...
I had finally opted for a smart watch (Fitbit), then Google acquired it. I finally got a Pixel because I was sick of dealing with Samsung's bs for "modifying" my phone (cuz Samsung apps can suck my grandma's balls), and I got GrapheneOS, but even now that's about to get nixed.
What is this referring to? I wasn't aware of any plans for the project to stop or be unable to continue.
edit: I assume you're talking about this?
tl;dr for anyone only semi-interested, GrapheneOS isn't going anywhere. Pixel 10 will be supported. Future Pixels will likely continue to be supported as long as they meet requirements and support alternative OSes. They're working with an OEM to make a phone that meets their requirements so they're not reliant on future Pixels continuing to support alternative OSes.
No, I'm talking about this.
Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen that either and am not a fan of the decision. It doesn't seem to be a concern for GrapheneOS, though.
I'm no fan, but
I've disabled Google services Framework, Google Play Services, and every other background Google service. NTFY provides real-time notifications, I don't use the Play Store, and I can see via Wireguard & PiHole that it's not reaching out to Google. Am I missing something, or is your GrapheneOS-running mobile not in a similar state?
Too niche for the average user.
You're not wrong, but I do think it's ironic that it's simultaneously too niche for nearly all users (which yes, you're right), and that grandparent, the person complaining one cannot escape Google when using Android, already has his cellphone set up this way
I hear ya. Back in the day it was Microsoft with its paw in everything. This too, shall pass.
No, it will not pass... it's just another cog in the AI machine, which I despise. DDG is an option and a holdout for the Big Brother that will be enforced eventually, because that's where capitalism forces freedom to go.
No, sadly I don't think it will. MS is going for data harvesting, as my company is being bought out for producing power (and MS was securing a contract for the like) because data harvesting is the thing.
I'd add to OP's hate on for Canadian banks with a serious dislike for Canadian telcos. My regional provider was purchased by Rogers recently, making for two options total across our country.
The nerve - despite staying with the other guy, Rogers door to door sales people get all huffy when I tell them I'd never use their company. One girl said "Well, Telus is just as bad" when I told her I'm not joining their near monopoly.
She's right, but sell me on your service not my perceived hate.
Palantir
I hear the Monsters Inc. CEO got busted for child trafficking. Definitely not the sort of people you'd want to open the door for.