Technology

My Google Pixel 5a died recently. To their credit, Google did extend the warranty on the 5a (probably would have been sued otherwise because these devices are dropping dead every day), but attempting to actually claim warranty was the most bizarre Kafkaesque process.

Ultimately it took me 6 weeks and at least 10 follow-ups with Google. They would forget things (like how to get information from their partner uBreakiFix) and would need me to do the legwork for them. Every time I called them I got the following impression:

1. Customer service agents at Google have NO power to do ANYTHING but read a script and follow policy. I know this is a common complaint with big companies, but I've been on this earth awhile and dealt with a lot of companies, and it honestly shocked me how little power the agents at Google had to actually help. Never seen anything like it before.

2. The agents similarly have no access to any information that might help you. In my case, once my RMA was delayed, every time I would call they would basically "check" on it, and the answer was basically: "well the replacement should have shipped by now, and I have no idea why it didn't, so I'm just going to add another 5 business days to the last estimate we gave you". No one was ever able to figure out the reason for the delay.

I was getting ready to file in small claims court against Google since it looked like they had no intention of honoring their warranty, but decided to give the old "get support via Tweet" method, which did actually get results. The funny thing was that Google scolded me for providing my RMA number via Twitter DMs since it's "private information" and I should have given them a case number that agents were supposed to provide me, but never did.

The social media escalation team did manage to get Google to overnight me a replacement after I reached out. However, after this experience (as you say, unhuman), I see no moral issue with stuff like blocking ads on YouTube. I think Google have fully shown their cards, at least to me, that they don't really care about service.

I realize they can't run something like YouTube like a small community website, for example, and that they do have to make money as a business. I kind of get where some of their recent actions come from. But I feel similarly to how I feel about media companies whose content I pirate. It's really not my problem, and not my job to help them figure out how to compete with piracy. Valve got shit figured out with Steam, and I've spent hundreds of dollars buying games on there. Media companies seemed like they had things figured out at one point with Netflix, but it wasn't sustainable, plus they got way too greedy. Google used to have their shit together, but they are being too heavy handed and anti consumer now.

In my position now I have at least some influence on the products that my company uses, and I would never recommend that we buy anything from Google if we can help it since the risk of being stonewalled by their support seems so high, and I've experienced that personally. In my personal life, I have a goal to get off of Google's services when I can, and pull all my data out. I don't ever want to be in a position again where I'm thinking of suing a company, but worried that they'll use my data and my reliance on their services as leverage against me the way Google can.