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In hindsight I’ll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent.
I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I’d looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I’d seen.
It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I’d been driving to my brother’s house, going about 40 mph, when my family’s newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it.
I jabbed at the “Power” button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle.
What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began.
That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.)
“We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,” the guy told me a few days later. “But we can’t identify the problem.”
Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.
“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.
“Might,” he said. “Might not.”
I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.
“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”
This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center.
Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she’d call back the next day.
Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela’s line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle’s malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn’t apply.
“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.
“I understand your frustration.”
Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car.
“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!
As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn’t even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I’d slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through.
Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.
“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”
On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.
Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.
I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?
Turns out there’s a word for it.
In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.
The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.
The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.
Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”
Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”
Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.
The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.
Call Pamela. Call the mechanic. Call the other mechanic. Call that lemon-law lawyer. My exhausted efforts, to the extent I understood them, revolved around getting my car either fixed or replaced and getting the various nodes in the Ford universe to talk with one another. In the middle of work, or dinner, or a kid’s soccer game, I’d peel off to answer a random call, because every now and then it was that one precious update from Ford, informing me that there was no news.
The hope, with all of this, was to burrow my way far enough into the circuitry to locate someone with the authority and inclination to help. Sometimes I got drips of information—the existence of a buyback department at Ford, for instance. Mostly I got nowhere.
The longer this dragged on, the more the matrix seemed to glitch. The dealership where I’d bought the car had no record of the salesman who’d sold it to me. Ford’s internal database, at one point, claimed that I had already picked up the car I was still trying to get them to fix. A mechanic told me, “It’s not that we couldn’t fix it. It’s that we never found the problem, so we were unable to fix it.”
Another mechanic, apparently as delighted by our conversations as I was, grew petulant.
“Driving is a luxury,” he told me without explanation.
Initiating these conversations in the first place: also a luxury, I was learning. For this we have the automatic call distributor to thank. The invention of this device in the mid–20th century allowed for the industrialization of customer service. In lieu of direct contact, calls could be funneled automatically to the next available agent, who would handle each one quickly and methodically.
Contact centers became an industry of their own and, with the rise of offshoring in the ’90s, lurched into a new level of productivity—at least from a corporate perspective. Sure, wait times lengthened, pleasantries grew stilted, and sometimes the new accents were hard to understand. But inefficiency had been conquered, or outsourced to the customer, anyway.
Researching this shift led me to Amas Tenumah. As a college student in Oklahoma, Tenumah had come up with a million-dollar invention: a tool that would translate those agent voices into text, and then convert that text into a digital voice.
“So you’d end up with this robotic conversation,” he told me, “which one could argue may even be worse. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The million dollars didn’t materialize, but connections did. Needing work, he took a telemarketing job at a company called TCIM Services. Rather than transform contact centers, he strapped on a headset and joined one.
The obsession with efficiency in his new field astonished him. Going to the bathroom required a code. Breaks were regulated to the minute. Outwardly he worked in an office, but by any measure it was a factory floor. Overly long “handle time”? He’d get dinged. Too few calls answered? He’d get dinged. Too many escalations to a supervisor? Ding. Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them.
In the two decades after he took that first job, Tenumah rose from agent to manager, ultimately running enormous contact centers around the world. His work took him from Colombia to the Philippines in an endless search for cheap and malleable labor.
In 2021, he published a slim book titled Waiting for Service: An Insider’s Account of Why Customer Service Is Broken + Tips to Avoid Bad Service. Between calls to Ford and various mechanics, I’d begun reading it, and listening to the podcast that Tenumah co-hosts. He has a funny, straight-shooting manner that somehow lets him dish about his industry while continuing to work in it.
When we first spoke, I mentioned that someone at Ford had told me that my case had been closed at my request; I had to go through the whole process of reopening it. Was I imagining things, I asked, or was my lack of progress deliberate?
Tenumah laughed.
“Yes, sludge is often intentional,” he said. “Of course. The goal is to put as much friction between you and whatever the expensive thing is. So the frontline person is given as limited information and authority as possible. And it’s punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.”
Helpfulness aside, I mentioned that I frequently felt like I was talking with someone alarmingly indifferent to my plight.
“That’s called good training,” Tenumah said. “What you’re hearing is a human successfully smoothed into a corporate algorithm, conditioned to prioritize policy over people. If you leave humans in their natural state, they start to care about people and listen to nuance, and are less likely to follow the policy.”
For some people, that humanity gets trained out of them. For others, the threat of punishment suppresses it. To keep bosses happy, Tenumah explained, agents develop tricks. If your average handle time is creeping up, hanging up on someone can bring it back down. If you’ve escalated too many times that day, you might “accidentally” transfer a caller back into the queue. Choices higher up the chain also add helpful friction, Tenumah said: Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers leads to poor connection with offshore contact centers; many of the calls disconnect on their own.
“No one says, ‘Let’s do bad service,’” Tenumah told me. “Instead they talk about things like credit percentages”—the number of refunds, rebates, or payouts extended to customers. “My boss would say, ‘We spent a million dollars in credits last month. That needs to come down to 750.’ That number becomes an edict, makes its way down to the agents answering the phones. You just start thinking about what levers you have.”
“Does anyone tell them to pull those levers?” I asked.
“The brilliance of the system is that they don’t have to say it out loud,” Tenumah said. “It’s built into the incentive structure.”
That structure, he said, can be traced to a shift in how companies operate. There was a time when the happiness of existing customers was a sacred metric. CEOs saw the long arc of loyalty as essential to a company’s success. That arc has snapped. Everyone still claims to value customer service, but as the average CEO tenure has shortened, executives have become more focused on delivering quick returns to shareholders and investors. This means prioritizing growth over the satisfaction of customers already on board.
Customers are part of the problem too, Tenumah added.
“We’ve gotten collectively worse at punishing companies we do business with,” he said. He pointed to a deeply unpopular airline whose most dissatisfied customers return only slightly less often than their most satisfied customers. “We as customers have gotten lazy. I joke that all the people who hate shopping at Walmart are usually complaining from inside Walmart.”
In other words, he said, companies feel emboldened to treat us however they want.
“It’s like an abusive relationship. All it takes is a 20 percent–off coupon and you’ll come back.”
As in any dysfunctional relationship, a glimmer of promise arrived just when I was giving up hope. As mysteriously as she’d vanished, Pamela came back one day, and non-updates began to trickle in: My case was still under review; my patience was appreciated.
All of this was starting to remind me of something I’d read. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was created in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA. The document was intended to spark a wave of nonviolent citizen resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. “Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions,” advised one passage. “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
I’d encountered the manual in the past, and had thought of it as a quirky old curio. Now I saw it anew, as an up-to-the-minute handbook for corporate America. The “purposeful stupidity” once meant to sabotage enemy regimes has been repurposed to frustrate us—weaponized inefficiency in the name of profit. (I later discovered that Slate’s Rebecca Onion had had this same revelation a full decade ago. Nevertheless the sabotage persists.)
As I waited for news from Ford, I searched for more contact-center agents willing to talk.
Rebecca Harris has fielded calls—mainly for telephone-, internet-, and TV-service companies—since 2007. She calls the work “traumatic.”
“I’d want to do everything I can to help the person on the other end,” she told me. “But I had to pretend that I can’t, because they don’t want me to escalate the call.”
Many customers called because they were feeling pinched by their bill. For a lot of them, a rebate was available. But between the callers and that rebate, the company had installed an expanse of sludge.
“They would outright tell you in training you’re not allowed to give them a rebate offer unless they ask you about it with specific words,” she said. “If they say they’re paying too much money, you couldn’t mention the rebate. Or if the customer was asking about a higher rebate but you knew there was a lower one, they trained us to redirect them to that one.”
Harris told me she’d think about her parents in times like this, and would treat her callers the way she’d want them treated. That didn’t go over well with her managers. “They’d call me in constantly to retrain me,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting the numbers they were asking me to meet, so they weren’t meeting their numbers.”
Supervisors didn’t tell Harris to deceive or thwart customers. But having them get frustrated and give up was the best way to meet those numbers.
Sometimes she’d intentionally drop a call or feign technical trouble: “‘I’m sorry, the call … I can’t … I’m having a hard time hearing y—.’ It was sad. Or sometimes we’d drag out the call enough that they’d get agitated, or say things that got them agitated, and they’d hang up.”
Even if an agent wanted to treat callers more humanely, much of the friction was structural, a longtime contact-center worker named Amayea Maat told me. For one, the different corners of a business were seldom connected, which forced callers to re-explain their problem over and over: more incentive to give up.
“And often they make the IVR”—interactive voice response, the automated phone systems we curse at—“really difficult to get through, so you get frustrated and go online.”
She described working with one government agency that programmed its IVR to simply hang up on people who’d been on hold for a certain amount of time.
There’s a moment in Ford’s hold music—an endless loop of demented hotel-lobby cheer—when the composition seems to speed up. By my 8,000th listen I was sure of it: The tempo rose infinitesimally in this one brief spot. Like the fly painted on men’s-room urinals, this imperfection was clearly engineered to focus my attention—and, in so doing, to distract me from the larger absurdity at hand.
Which is to say, my sanity had begun to fray.
When I set out to document the inner workings of sludge, I had in mind the dull architecture of delays and deferrals. But I had started to notice my own inner workings. The aggravation was adding up, and so was the fatigue. Arguing was exhausting. Being transferred to argue with a different person was exhausting. The illogic was exhausting.
Individually, the calls and emails were blandly substance-free. But together they spoke clearly: You are powerless. I began to wonder: Was the accretion of these exhaustions complicit in the broader hopelessness we seem to be feeling these days? Were these hassles and frictions not just costing us but warping us with a kind of administrative-spiritual defeatism?
Signs of that warping seem to be appearing more and more, as when a Utah man who says he was denied a refund for his apparently defective Subaru crashed the car through the dealership’s door. But most of us wearily combat sludge through the proper channels, however hopeless it seems. A Nebraska man spent two years trying to change the apparently computer-generated name given to his daughter, Unakite Thirteen Hotel, after a bureaucratic error involving her birth certificate. She also hadn’t received a Social Security number—without which she couldn’t receive Medicaid and other services.
In his 2021 follow-up to Nudge, Sludge, Sunstein notes that this constellation of frictions “makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter.” I asked Sunstein about this depletion. “Suppose that people spend hours on the phone, waiting for help from the Social Security Administration, or seeking to get a license or a permit to do something,” he replied. “They might start to despair, not only because of all that wasted time but because they are being treated as if they just don’t count.”
For Pamela Herd, a social-policy professor at the University of Michigan, sludge became personal when she began navigating services for her daughter, who has a disability. “It’s one thing when I get frustrated at the DMV,” she told me. “It’s another thing when you’re in a position where your kid’s life might be on the line, or your kid’s access to health insurance, or your access to food.”
In 2018, Herd published Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, with her husband, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Michigan. The book examines how bureaucratic quicksand—complex paperwork, confusing procedures—actively stymies policy and access to government services. Rather than mere inefficiencies, the authors argue, a number of these obstacles are deliberate policy tools that discourage participation in programs such as Medicaid, keep people from voting, and limit access to social welfare. Marginalized communities are hit disproportionately.
Throughout my ordeal, it was always clear that I was among the fortunate sludgees. I had the time and flexibility to fight in the first place—to wait on hold, to write follow-up emails. Most people would’ve just agreed to start driving the damn car again. Fuck it.
One of sludge’s most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions, Herd told me. Once that skepticism sets in, it’s not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency. She was on speakerphone as she told me this, driving through the Southwest on vacation with Moynihan. As it happened, something had flown up and hit their windshield just before our conversation, and they were surely headed for a protracted discussion between their rental-car company and their insurance company—a little sludge of their own.
Exasperated as we all are, said Tenumah, the customer-service expert, things are going to get much worse when customer service is fully managed by AI. And, as Moynihan observed, DOGE has already taken our frustration with government inefficiency and perverted it into drastic cuts that also will only further complicate our lives.
But in some corners of academia and government, pushback to sludge is mounting. Regulations like the FTC’s “Click to Cancel” rule seek to eliminate barriers to canceling subscriptions and memberships. And the International Sludge Academy, a new initiative from both the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the government of New South Wales, has promoted the adoption of “sludge audits” around the world. The business research firm Gartner predicts that “the right to talk to a human” will be EU law by 2028.
In the meantime, I’ve developed my own way of responding.
Years before my Ford ordeal, I’d already begun to understand that sludge was doing something to us. It first registered when I noticed a new vein of excuse in the RSVP sphere: “Sorry, love to, but I need to figure out our passport application tonight.” “Sorry, researching new insurance plans.”
The domestic tasks weren’t new; the novelty was all the ways we were drowning in the basic administration of our own lives. I didn’t have a solution. But I had an idea for addressing it. I fired off an email to some friends, and on a Tuesday night, a tradition began.
“Admin Night” isn’t a party. It isn’t laborious taking-care-of-business. It’s both! At the appointed hour, friends come over with beer and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, summer-camp paperwork. Five minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, rinse, repeat. At the end of each gathering, everyone names a minor bureaucratic victory and the group lets out a supportive cheer.
Admin Night rules. In an era of fraying social ties, it claws back a sliver of hang time. Part of the appeal is simply being able to socialize while plowing through the to-do list—a 21st-century efficiency fetish if ever there was one. But just as satisfying is having this species of modern enervation brought into the light. Learning of sludge’s existence, Thum, the bureaucracy researcher, told me, is the first step in fighting it, and in pushing back against the despair it provokes.
Among sludge’s mysteries is how it can suddenly clear. With no explanation, Pamela called one day to tell me that Ford had decided to buy back my car. She put me in touch with the Reacquired Vehicles Headquarters. From there I was connected to a “repurchase coordinator,” then I was told to wait for another process in “Quality,” and after some haggling over the price they agreed to buy the car back. To Ford’s credit, they gave me a fair offer. But I would’ve accepted a turkey sandwich at that point.
What happens to the car next? I asked. I was told that if returned vehicles could be repaired, they could be resold with disclosures. But was Ford obligated to fix the defect before selling it? No one could give me a clear answer. I pondered options for warning potential buyers. Could I post something to Yelp and hope it somehow got noticed? Hide a note inside the car somewhere? Publish the Vehicle Identification Number—1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474—in a national magazine?
Before I could decide on a solution, I got the call. One hundred eight days after this whole thing began, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove to the San Jose dealership where my Escape had been waiting all this time. When I arrived, a man named Dennis greeted me and we walked to the lot where the car was sitting. I grabbed everything out of the center console, and then we walked back inside.
“What’s going to happen to it?” I asked. “Are they going to resell it?”
Dennis didn’t know, or didn’t seem inclined to discuss. (A Ford communications director named Mike Levine later told The Atlantic that the company does not resell any repurchased vehicles that can’t be fully repaired. Given the confusion I witnessed, I still wonder how they confirm that a car is fully repaired.) I signed some papers, and it was over. The car that wasn’t safe to drive, the process that seemed designed not to work—the whole experience ended not with a bang but with a cashier’s check and a wordless handshake.
When I originally alerted Ford about this article, a spokesperson named Maria told me that my case was not typical and that she was sorry about it. Regarding all the back-and-forth, she said, “that was not seamless.” Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford. He said that the teams I spoke with had needed time to see whether they could replicate the problem with my car, though to my mind that suggests a more concerted effort than what I perceived.
Pamela emailed an apology, too, adding that, given “the experience you had with your vehicle, I do want to extend an offer for a maintenance plan for your vehicle should you decide to purchase a Ford again, as a complimentary gift for your patience with the brand, as I understand this process took a long time.”
We did purchase another vehicle, but it wasn’t a Ford.
Lately I’ve taken to noticing small victories in the war against sludge. That Nebraska dad with the daughter named Unakite Thirteen Hotel? I’m happy to report she was at last given a Social Security number in February, and was on her way to finally, officially, becoming Caroline.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking of all the time her dad lost in that soul-sucking battle.
“It’s been very, very taxing,” he said in an interview.
I understood his frustration.
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