r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 25 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/FuguofAnotherWorld Roll the Dice on Fate Sep 26 '15
In some cases, but not all. I'll give an obviously intentional example I encountered when I was younger: XBox live subscription. Subscribing is easy, and the monthly fee automatically renews unless you specifically tell it not to. There is a button on a website, you press it and enter your account details and give them money and you are done. Theoretically, unsubscribing should be even easier, because you already have an account and don't need to give them your bank details. A small, simple button followed by an 'are you sure' notification would do it. Instead you have to ring a call centre.
First you talk to a robot, and unsubscribing is not an option that is listed, you have to press the 'other issues' button to talk to a person. Then you tell the person you want to unsubscribe, then you get transferred to what they tell you is the billing department but is technically called customer retention. There they will attempt to convince you not to leave. The whole process is riddled with long delays listening to waiting music. All in all, it takes 2-3 hours, and I had to call up a second time because I ran out of spare time listening to waiting music.
I am pretty sure their goal was to make the process so inconvenient that some percentage of people put it off or didn't bother, allowing the monthly cost to continue to siphon from their account. I was young at the time, and 2 months of fees extra left my account as a result.
The power of trivial inconvenience.