Your call is not important to us

As I sit here in endless hold awaiting a human being so I can begin the process of reclaiming a small chunk of the $1,000-plus I pay annually to the New York Times for a dead tree dropped on my door step I have time to marvel at how truly inconvenient people have become to those who sell them goods and services.

One company I’ve dealt with recently — Uber — won’t deign to communicate by any means others that Twitter. Even when it is to try and report a hack perpetrated by a text message. Welcome to the Brave New World.

The Boston Globe and The New York Times have been a constant source of frustration. If I didn’t know better I might think they are individually or collectively plotting to drive all home delivery customers into digital only service.

It’s hard to reach a more rational conclusion when you deal with repeated failure to live up to what is now being passed off as a “goal” of a delivery time for the Globe. And for the refusal to provide credit for papers (paid for in advance) that arrive after you leave for your daily tasks. If they arrive at all.

Today, the Paper of Record duly informed me as a result of an unspecified printing problem “Today’s copy of The New York Times will be delivered tomorrow.”

Perhaps they are considering a change in their motto from “All the News that’s Fit to Print” to”Yesterday’s News Tomorrow”?

But at least you can communicate with human beings with names at these newspapers through email and phone. Not so with Uber.

We received a fishy (OK, now I know phishy) text from Uber in mid-September that said our Uber code was XXXX and if it’s wasn’t us we should text STOP to unsubscribe. The reply was “SMS from Uber is now disabled” (something we learned was true after we tried to reply to “Uber” after a follow-up text.) We also changed the password. Immediately.

In hindsight the Chinese characters in the text should have been a warning.

Once we realized the account had been hacked we managed to sign in and discovered the mobile number used to create the account had been made a secondary number to the one used by the hacker.

And that’s when the Catch 22 began.

Searching the Uber web site in vain for email or phone assistance we finally discovered the highly secure route of Twitter DM (insert snark emoji here). But when we tried to reach out to Uber we discovered the only way to communicate with them about the issue was by confirming our existence through the account phone number and email. Did that mean the hacked number? Or the real one?

Unwilling to offer up the number again we chose to provide our landline along with the email account attached to the DM. I think that ancient technology flummoxed them. No response.

Clear that Uber wasn’t about to do a thing, we cancelled the credit card associated with the account (sticking them with a ride, unfortunately only $7).

But by this time the hack had spread to Amazon. Where a human being using a telephone quickly resolved our issues. And to our email account. Which we were able to resolve without any other intercession.

I’m sure Uber isn’t mourning the loss of two potential customers to Lyft. Or the lost $7.

But here’s hoping more people will begin to take note of how human un-friendly this company is.

It taks a lot to make newspaper delivery companies look good. But Uber has succeeded.