Tech support for the truly dedicated: lug this Stone of Agony across the campus of a tech company in order to receive actual human tech support!

The Issue:

A common user complaint about “Big Tech” is that it can be literally impossible for customers to contact an actual human for tech support.

For example, a user may have literally no recourse if: 1) their email account was terminated (e.g. due to “spamming”), 2) their video hosting was deleted (e.g. due to “Copyright Violation“), 3) or their physical address was added to a list of “don’t ship here” addresses used by scammers.

Proposal:

We ask ourselves: how can companies with hundreds of millions of users somehow provide human tech support without being overwhelmed by the quantity of support cases?

The answer: a user who needs tech support must demonstrate their dedication to the company (and, therefore, their worthiness of tech support) by dragging an enormous object—tentatively called the “STONE OF AGONY”—on a single lap around the perimeter of the company’s corporate headquarters (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: A user who wants Netscape[1] product support is decades too late, but hypothetically they could have dragged this giant ball-and-chain around the company headquarters in order to obtain in-person customer support. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape.

The object that must be dragged could come in several different shapes and sizes. Perhaps this could even reflect the number of minutes of tech support that a user would get!

Alternative:

One option that is frequently suggested to solve this problem is “could a person not just pay a small amount for an individual ‘single serving’ of of tech support?” You’d think this would be a common option, but it’s actually quite rare!

PROS: Provides an easy way to triage tech support.

CONS: Employees might not appreciate that these “tech support pilgrimages” would bring a large number of disgruntled users to their headquarters.