customer service

An original recording of a Verizon customer service call in which the rep fails to understand the difference between cents and dollars, known as Verizon Math.

A one-minute clip of David Mitchell on a UK panel show explaining why he respects poor customer service in Britain. He argues that people who do their job well should not also be required to be nice.

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

Jimmy Bogard presents a post-mortem of a real microservices migration that turned into a slow distributed monolith. He covers the modeling, development and production problems and how the team recovered.

Dave Carroll's song and music video about United Airlines baggage handlers breaking his Taylor guitar and the airline's refusal to compensate him. It became a viral example of a customer fighting a company.

A QCon talk from Netflix on running a large microservices architecture and building resilience into it. It touches on tooling such as Hystrix and circuit breakers.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch in which engineers explain an absurdly tangled microservices architecture to a manager. It parodies how backend complexity gets justified with jargon.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

Michael Bryzek of Flow gives a QCon London 2018 talk on key decisions for building maintainable microservices. It covers infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming and language choice.

A Startup School talk by YC partner and former Airbnb growth head Gustaf Alstromer on how startups get their first customers. It covers doing things that don't scale, founders learning sales, the sales funnel, and charging your first customer.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

Music video for Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" from the album The Race For Space, built from NASA audio and archival material of Apollo-era voices.

Videogamedunkey's satirical guide to the fragmented streaming service landscape, ending in a joke about how to watch King Kong.

A Yes, Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a poll produce either answer on national service.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

Lily Tomlin's classic 1976 Saturday Night Live sketch as telephone operator Ernestine, mocking the monopolistic Bell phone company with the line 'We don't care. We don't have to.' It is a one-minute parody of arrogant corporate indifference.

Gamers Nexus criticizes ASUS over its handling of exploding Ryzen CPUs, overvolting BIOS settings and warranty and support behavior. It re-benchmarks the chips at defaults and argues ASUS eroded customer trust.

Real Engineering explains how Zipline built a drone delivery network for medical supplies in Rwanda. It covers the fixed-wing drones, catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind the service.

Jason Scott of Archive Team describes how a loose band of volunteers rushes to copy sites like Geocities, Friendster and Yahoo Video before their owners delete them. The talk covers the tactics they use and the argument that this data is history worth saving.

A three-minute video from Derek Sivers, based on his book Anything You Want, about remembering that the people you deal with online are real people. It contrasts how we treat people face to face with how we treat them online.

A short 2009 video of Jeff Bezos talking about Amazon and Zappos. He discusses customer focus, invention and long-term thinking.

Bryan Seely tells how he used fake Google Maps business listings to intercept phone calls meant for the Secret Service and FBI. He then turned himself in, and the talk explains the verification gaps that made it possible.

A one-minute clip from the film Elysium in which Matt Damon's character is stuck with an automated AI parole officer and gets asked whether he would like to talk to a human.

A short clip demonstrating a phone-based social engineering trick in which a crying baby in the background is used to pressure a customer service rep. It shows how attackers exploit human sympathy rather than technical flaws.

The Little Britain sketch in which call-center worker Carol types into her computer and replies 'computer says no' to every request.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that tipping should be banned. It covers the history of tipping, its weak link to service quality, and why employers should pay a fair wage.

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

A clean-audio clip from Apple's 1997 WWDC where Steve Jobs answers a hostile question from a developer about OpenDoc. He argues you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

Gary Vaynerchuk's keynote at RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore. The Wine Library TV founder talks about building a business and audience through genuine effort and caring about customers.

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel lectures at Startup School on building a product people want: identifying the problem, the customer, an MVP and which customers to pursue first.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US Postal Service's financial troubles. John Oliver explains why it matters, what pushed it to this point, and what viewers can do.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

Louis Rossmann reacts to a CBC News segment in which an Apple Genius Bar quoted a costly logic board and display replacement for a MacBook that had only a bent pin. He explains why the repair is simple and what the case shows about Apple's repair practices.

A 1940 Bell Telephone educational short teaching customers how to use their new dial phones and why the change was happening. It is a period piece about rolling out a new technology to ordinary people.

A satirical Onion Talks episode in which a startup founder explains making money by selling his users' data to oppressive governments. It parodies tech conference talks and monetization of communities.