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ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

Last summer, reporter Chris Colin left his apartment in San Francisco on a simple errand to pick up his dog, Rosie, from his brother’s house. It was a sunny, beautiful Saturday afternoon as Chris drove down Bayshore Boulevard in his fairly new Ford Escape. 

CHRIS COLIN: And I’m going about 40. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the car shuts off. The steering locks up. The power brakes die. You can’t do anything. And you know, there’s not really emergency brakes like there used to be. So I’m just, like, rocketing down Bayshore. And up ahead I see the road sort of bend, and there’s, like, a little bit of an area where one would fly off. I didn’t know what to do. I actually started reaching for the handle–the door handle–like, “Am I going to do some Lee Majors style stunt here?”

ROMAN MARS: Chris did not have to dive out of his moving car, thank god. Instead of flying off the road, the compact SUV somehow miraculously drifted to a stop. Obviously, the experience was pretty scary. Chris also had no idea what had caused the malfunction. And as he took the car from one mechanic to another, and then another, he learned that they couldn’t figure out the problem either. But Chris wasn’t really worried. He had the confidence of a new car owner protected by a warranty. He was sure that Ford would fix this quickly, and he would get on with his life. Easy. So he reached out to the one place designed to help consumers like him with problems just like this: the customer service department. 

CHRIS COLIN: I call Ford headquarters, and I’m like, “Okay, time to start talking about returning this car or whatever you do when it can’t be fixed.” And that’s when they tell me, “Well, until we can replicate the problem, we can’t make good on this warranty.”

ROMAN MARS: Again and again, Chris called customer service, hoping to reach a human being who would understand his issue and help him solve it. Instead, Chris’ life descended into a monthslong saga with customer care. He describes this whole experience as “a cretinous ordeal.”

CHRIS COLIN: I’m just making these dumb, boring phone calls, waiting on hold, getting transferred, having to type in my zip code again, and having to re-explain the problem again. You know, increasingly, I find that I’m getting disconnected. The call gets cut off, or I get transferred back to the wrong person. 

ROMAN MARS: We have all been here, maybe with a car company or your internet provider or an airline. You call a customer service line. You get routed and then rerouted and then re-rerouted for hours. The call gets dropped. And after a few minutes of screaming into the void, you start the whole thing all over again. Or you get a virtual assistant who, no matter how many times you yell “operator,” will not connect you to a real person. And then slowly, your will to fight starts to dissolve. 

CHRIS COLIN: I started talking to people about it. And what they all said to me is, “Yeah–oh my god–I deal with this all the time. And I just reach a point where I say, ‘[BLEEP] it.'” I’m sorry to go purple on you, Roman, but that is what they say. And I really feel like that encapsulates something about what’s happening to us as a society. You have this parking ticket that you don’t want to contest anymore. You have a claim that you can’t argue about anymore. And you just say, “[BLEEP] it, I’ll pay the $30. I’ll pay the $90.” And I started to see that we are living in a state of [BLEEP] it. 

ROMAN MARS: In the middle of his car ordeal, Chris also started to wonder if the headaches and frustrations we all face when we deal with customer service are all by design. And it turns out–yeah–a lot of times they are. Recently, I spoke with Chris about his latest story for The Atlantic, in which he writes about these kinds of obstacles in customer care that drive us all crazy. There’s even a name for them. They’re called “sludge.”

CHRIS COLIN: Sludge is basically the stuff that slows us down–it’s friction, it’s legalese, it’s needless complexity… It’s all of these things that don’t rise to the level of, you know, a policy that tells you you can’t have something. It’s subtler and more insidious than that, but it deters you from getting what you’re owed.

ROMAN MARS: And you write that sludge is this term coined by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, the economist. And this is the polar opposite of “nudge,” which is their research about trying to get you to do things. This is trying to get things shut down, I guess, you know? It’s cavernous procedural stuff on forums and questionnaires. It’s the administrative hoops that you have to jump through to get basic things done. And when it comes to customer service, it’s stuff like endless wait times. 

CHRIS COLIN: Exactly. You can have perfectly good policy. But if folks are discouraged from getting whatever they’re owed, then what’s the point of the policy? 

ROMAN MARS: So you went about trying to identify the various tactics and companies and institutions used to create sludge–the “secret art of sludge,” so to speak. And to do that, you talked to people in the customer service industry. So who and what did you find that was enlightening for you? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, what I found was a guy. His name is Amas Tenumah. And he sort of became my deep throat. He has been working in the contact center industry–or “call centers” we sometimes call them–for a couple of decades. He started out as a call center worker. And he worked his way up to where he was setting them up, overseeing them, and managing them around the world. And he starts telling me the tricks that they have in these call centers. And unlike most people in this line of work, he was willing to pull back the curtain and talk about some of the dark secrets of the industry. 

ROMAN MARS: So let’s get into those dark secrets that shape the design of modern customer service. What are some of the components that you were sort of led through by Amas Tenumah? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, so first of all, obviously, when you need to call a company, you’re not going to get through to a person right away. You’re going to wait on hold. We are all familiar with the line, “hold times are longer than expected,” or however they phrased it. So, that is a form of sludge, too, because companies could hire enough call center workers that we don’t have to wait on hold as long. But they don’t. So, that’s step number one in creating sludge. You’re going to talk to someone who needs to hear every little bit about, you know, who you are, where you live, and what your phone number is. They’re going to need to transfer you. You know, so it happens at that level. But it also happens above that. It happens when you are the company and you choose where to locate your customer service. I think we all probably remember that customer service got outsourced and then moved to usually places outside the country, where labor is cheaper. And what Amas explained to me is that one aspect of sludge happens in that location because we have to make long distance calls to reach those call centers. And there are more reliable ways of setting up those calls, I learned. And then there are cheaper ways. And those companies usually choose the cheaper ways. So that’s another kind of sludge because the call quality is poor. You do get disconnected sometimes. And so these are kind of more passive elements of sludge’s architecture. 

ROMAN MARS: Right. So, I want to ask you about the front line of this customer service apparatus–the one that we deal with when we sort of encounter sludge. And that’s the customer service rep. You spoke with Amas and others about these front line people. Can you just talk about what that role is and how hard it is on them actually to deal with this? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because, as frustrated as we get with the person on the other end of the call, it is a really, really hard and pretty joyless job, as far as I can understand it. I talk to a lot of folks who do it. And what they describe is more like a factory floor than an office job. Every aspect of their work is measured. There are all these penalties if they escalate a call too many times, if they solve too many problems, and if they give away too many “credits,” which is a term of the industry. So–yeah–it’s very easy to get frustrated with them, especially when they are talking in this kind of inhuman corporate language. But I think it’s a job that puts them in a really impossible spot, where basically they’re not trying to serve the customer. And a big part of sludge, and this is what I heard from call center workers that I talked to, is having that personness–that humanity–trained out of you. Amas Tenumah said they’re training you into being an algorithm because people are naturally empathetic. And as Amas told me, that doesn’t serve the bottom line. They have to train that out of you very quickly. Otherwise, those call center workers are just going to be giving away what you’re entitled to. And that doesn’t help them.

ROMAN MARS: And one thing that kind of encapsulates the problem with these call centers is something you mentioned about your own experience that, I think, we’ve probably all experienced. And that’s dropped calls and getting disconnected when you get transferred and all these little, you know, accidents, if you will. And you say Amas kind of explained what was really happening here. 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah. I start calling him and I’m like, “Amas, is this really accidental? It doesn’t seem like it.” And he just laughs. He’s like, “Of course it’s on purpose.” You know, there are all these tricks. And one is these agents have something called an “average handle time”–what’s your average length of your phone call, basically. They get penalized all the time. I mean, going to the bathroom–they measure the length of how long they’re away from their headsets. So they are really afraid of getting penalized. If their handle time starts creeping up, what’s an easy way to bring your average down? Hang up very quickly. So that’s one common thing. So, yeah, those hangups are often on purpose. 

ROMAN MARS: And is this the kind of thing where it’s explicitly stated somewhere in company policy that, like, a rep has to cut off a caller after five minutes? Or is it just a corporation incentivizing various departments to cut corners and cut costs without any individuals actually conspiring? 

CHRIS COLIN: It is hard to prove. It’s insidious. It’s subtle. These organizations are… The architecture of them is cellular. So, you know, if you are the person answering the phone, you don’t know what the order was from two notches above you. You’re just doing what’s been asked of you. So a lot of people aren’t aware that they are perpetuating sludge. At the top, I don’t think they say, “Let’s do bad service.” I think they just say, “We need to bring these numbers to this place. Please make that happen.” And that trickles down. So, it doesn’t have to be all deliberate. But it’s still happening. And I always think about the George Carlin line, “You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests align.” The interest is for us to give up and to walk away before we get what we’re owed. 

ROMAN MARS: I love that George Carlin quote so much. And it makes me wonder–conspiracy or not–for the companies that use sludge tactics on their customers, like hanging up on them, are there actual consequences? Is there accountability? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah. So, you have groups like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that’s gone after Toyota for… Toyota set up this hotline to give you a refund on something. And it was a dead-end hotline; you couldn’t get through. And ProPublica, a couple of years ago, showed that Cigna had saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would go through the process of appeal. Now Cigna has since pushed back on that, I’m obliged to say. But it’s that kind of thing where they know that you are just going to give up or they set up a hotline where you literally can’t get through to a person because they’re trying to get you to go online. They want you to deal with their website rather than a person on the other end of the phone. 

ROMAN MARS: You would think that sludge is actually bad for business in the long run–that companies would worry about making things too sludgy and that would backfire and customers would just take their business elsewhere. Could you talk about the gamble that companies are willing to take in making this calculation? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, that’s a great question and I wondered that throughout my saga. Why is this helping them for me to be this frustrated? Surely this is bad for business. It pays off. It’s a calculation they’re making. Maybe it doesn’t pay off in the long run. But these CEOs–their tenure is shorter than ever, so they are not going for the long-term health of their company. They’re going for short-term gains, just growing the company as fast as possible. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s fascinating to me how the whole system has sort of evolved to lead to sludge. Like, a CEO’s tenure is short–maybe shorter than ever–and they’re paid more in stock prices than salary. So their incentive is to save the company as much money as possible in the quarter that they’re in and increase share prices fast. So, they want immediate results more than they’re worried about keeping a long-term customer satisfied. Who gives a [BLEEP] about that person? They’re not providing more shareholder value at all. And you can then see how everything in the system leads to sludgy, frustrating experiences–the kind that we’ve all been through. 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, no, that’s totally right. It’s the incentive structure. And so that means getting new customers rather than tending to the existing ones. And we can see that. We feel that. It’s really easy to sign up for a new service. It’s real easy to pay a company money. You don’t ever have to wait on hold to do that. Those wheels are perfectly well-greased. The problem is when you have a problem as an existing customer. So, for those reasons, you start to see it trickle down into the call centers. They need to hit their numbers. And when they don’t do that, then that’s when they have to start pulling whatever levers they have. But it’s also our fault. That’s something that my source, Amas Tenumah, pointed out. He said, “Look–yes–sludge is out there. It’s insidious. But we as consumers and customers have a responsibility, too.” He said, “One of the most hated airlines in this country…” He named it. I won’t say it. But I think, if you live in the United States of America, you can probably figure out what it is. People despise this airline, and they get back on those planes every time as soon as the price is right. So we are not disciplined consumers, as Amas told me. If we want to have an impact–if we wanna try and move the needle in some way–we need to start by paying attention to who we support and who we don’t. 

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] I don’t know. I get that there’s a part of the system that involves me, but to say that it’s my responsibility to unhook myself from the system so that it breaks seems a little disingenuous. 

CHRIS COLIN: Definitely. 

ROMAN MARS: They put me here. I was put here by them, not me. 

CHRIS COLIN: That’s right, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. 

ROMAN MARS: But I digress, okay. I want to ask you about some of the more dangerous kinds of sludge. I mean, you mentioned that you had to deal with your car problem. But you’re a journalist. You work at home a lot. You have some free time. You can navigate this a bit differently than other folks. But there are things like changes to Medicaid, which are introducing new sludge into the system, like having work requirements, which are this dark and cynical form of sludge. Like, the system is getting more oriented so that they have to prove that you deserve these benefits, instead of getting them more automatically. And these roadblocks to crucial public services can have really harmful consequences. Could you talk about the dangers of sludge when it comes to our society? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, I mean, I had the privilege of fighting over something as small as a car. I mean, it was annoying, but it was just a car. There are people who are getting screwed out of insurance, out of SNAP benefits, and out of all kinds of benefits they’re entitled to and that have, like you say, real-world, intense consequences. And you see it all the time. You see it in the Big Beautiful Bill. There are benefits that we are entitled to, and we are being prevented from accessing them. And the consequences are huge. It has to do with our health. It has to do with whether our kids get the benefits or get food on the table. 

ROMAN MARS: Coming up, we’ll get into some of the weird history of sludge and talk about ways to survive the sludgiest parts of modern day customer service. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: I’m back with Chris Colin. And I want to talk a little bit about some of sludge’s weird past because you discovered that sludge has a quirky historical ancestor. 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah. On my hold times, when I was waiting there going crazy, I would of course, you know, play on my phone and search for things on Google. And I started reading this field manual for sabotage that was created in the early ’40s that our government made and distributed to citizens in Nazi-occupied Europe. And it’s an awesome document–one of the best documents our government has ever created. And you can get it online. It’s very easy to find because it’s been declassified. And it’s full of these dumb little ideas for how you can sabotage whoever’s keeping you down–in their case, the Nazis. But it’s not taking up arms, it’s weaponizing incompetence. So, lose your tools. In meetings, bring up needless topics to discuss. 

ROMAN MARS: Give people the wrong directions. Make them go the long way. So, if you’re in an occupied country, these are just all the things you can do, as a citizen, to just slow down the gears of the occupier. 

CHRIS COLIN: Absolutely. And as I read it, I was thinking, “Oh my God, this is what they are doing to us.” This is sludge in a nutshell. It’s all of these silly little ways to sort of slow us down and impede our progress.

ROMAN MARS: So that’s kind of the ghost of sludge past, but I also wonder about the ghost of sludge future. So you’re from San Francisco. I drive through San Francisco all the time. And all the billboards I see are about AI agents helping me through customer service. But actually, they’re trying to sell AI agents to companies to help me through customer service. How do you anticipate AI adding to or maybe taking away from the sludge? I don’t want to be too cynical out of the gate, but–

CHRIS COLIN: I was afraid you were going to ask this. It’s not going to be good. Yeah, no, AI is about to make things way, way worse. Obviously, we encounter AI already when we call customer service. But they are about to dump much more on us. And this actually goes back to COVID. COVID, as you’ll recall, had us all locked in. We weren’t going out, and so we had to do a lot more remote customer service. And companies had to hire AI to field those calls. And after the pandemic started to let up and companies could sort of reappraise their systems, they took a look and they asked customers, basically, “How was that for you?” And we all said the same thing. “That sucked. That was terrible. Please don’t make us talk to AI anymore. We don’t like it.” It was unambiguous. And what companies heard was: “So, you tolerated it?” Ever since then, they took away this kind of deranged lesson, which is that we may not like dealing with AI, but we’re willing to suck it up. And so, ever since then, the race has been on to find new ways to bring AI to customer service. 

ROMAN MARS: And this is the ultimate dehumanization of the customer service system because they’re just reading your syllables and translating it to something and then putting phonemes back at you. And it’s not an actual conversation. 

CHRIS COLIN: That’s right. And to be fair, there are things AI is good at, of course. There are ways that it can solve problems more efficiently than human call center agents can do. But by and large, it drives us crazy. And a big part of sludge architecture is us going crazy. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, when I get a phone thing, I just began saying “operator” into the thing or hitting zero all the time. What are some guerrilla tactics of just getting through the sludge, if they still work at all? 

CHRIS COLIN: I’m sorry to say those days are behind us. It used to be that you could press zero or you could say “operator” or “agent” or speak unintelligibly, and they would eventually connect you. But they have gotten wise to that stuff. They want to make you wait on hold as long as you can so that eventually you get frustrated and then you use their web portal, which may or may not work. 

ROMAN MARS: So, a few weeks ago, before my twins had to go to college, I had to get them their California Real ID. And I sent in some of the proof of address and all the different forms ahead of time. And we decided to go first thing when they opened in the morning so that we could get into the queue properly. I didn’t set an appointment. We just went really early in the morning. And when you go in, you get this kind of deli-style number, like D25 and G27. And it doesn’t go exactly in order. Like, you know that your number is coming up because they have these different letters. You know, it’s a little opaque. And they have some room to make decisions on the fly based on–I don’t know–how important your problem is with the DMV. The point is, I was struck by how things seemed so fair and just transparent enough that no one gets upset about it because we’re all moving forward in the system. And I thought it was kind of this brilliant experience–at the California DMV of all places. That used to be exhibit A of sludge, and they seemed to have really overcome this horrible reputation. 

CHRIS COLIN: Yeah, I agree. I think the DMV has gotten its act together. I think they got tired of being the butt of jokes. I suspect they did something called a “sludge audit,” which is what some folks who are battling the sludge phenomenon are calling for–just having this be a normal part of businesses and of government agencies. Do a sledge audit. Take a look at your systems and see. Are they sludgy? Can they be made more efficient? Can they be made less opaque? Yeah, I think that’s an example of, you know, doing it right. 

ROMAN MARS: So your article is really fun because it’s fun to find someone who is experiencing the same misery as you are, even though the subject of sludge is pretty dreary. But one of the things in your article that made my heart leap was you describing “admin night,” which is short for “administrative night.” And it’s this thing that you came up with to deal with the sludge of the world. Could you describe admin night? 

CHRIS COLIN: Yes, thank you. I love admin night. I love talking about admin night. I am now going to proselytize about it. 

ROMAN MARS: Please. 

CHRIS COLIN: A few years ago, I realized that, among my friends, there was this new genre of excuse popping up into our discourse about why you couldn’t hang out on Thursday night–a time when we’d normally go get a beer or whatever. I started hearing from them and from myself, “Ah, you know, I’d love to, but I gotta deal with this stupid insurance thing,” or “I’ve gotta fill out this form for my kid’s school,” or “I gotta catch up on bills,” or… It was all familiar, normal, sort of domestic responsibilities. But there was just so much of it all of a sudden. It felt like we were just overwhelmed in a new way–at a new level. And I saw it kind of atomizing us. So I fired off an email to a bunch of friends and neighbors, and I said, “Come over next Tuesday night. Bring a six pack. Bring a big pile of whatever paperwork has been weighing on you or whatever stupid bureaucratic thing you’ve gotta deal with. And we’re gonna do it together.” And so that became this thing that I call admin night. So friends come over and we do admin together. You talk for five minutes–you know–chit chat. And then you put your heads down and you power through whatever stuff you’ve got to do for about 20 minutes. You take a break. You hang out some more, have a drink, and have some snacks. And you just do this for a couple hours. And at the end, we all go around the horn, and each person names some dumb little thing that they checked off their list. And we all cheer. And it’s awesome. It sounds like a really nerdy thing. It doesn’t sound like the kind of party you might picture when you think of parties, but it’s kind of cool. 

ROMAN MARS: I love it. I love it! It actually made me so hopeful amongst all of this that I was like, “Oh my God! Maybe we could get this…” Admin night–if that came out of your research into sludge–that would be just beautiful. 

CHRIS COLIN: Thank you. 

ROMAN MARS: Because that’s what it is. It’s the doing it alone–feeling crazy. It’s also just, like, the energy to do stuff–just to respond to these things… I mean, you’re turning sludge into nudge. It’s pretty great. 

CHRIS COLIN: I also think part of the fun is just daylighting sludge. By having a thing called admin night–by acknowledging that we are all drowning in this stupid stuff–that alone feels good. That alone is worth something, and it’s part of the fight against [BLEEP] it. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. So, let’s close the loop on your Ford Saga. So what ended up happening after you sort of, like, hit their sludge and then had to navigate it for months on end. 

CHRIS COLIN: I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. I didn’t turn into the guy I read about in Utah who got so frustrated with his car situation that he crashed his Subaru through the front door of a dealership. I didn’t do that. 

ROMAN MARS: I’m glad. 

CHRIS COLIN: Pleased to say. After… I think it was a little over a hundred days. But eventually I did talk to someone who began the process of buying back the car. And ultimately that’s what happened. They handed me a check. I surrendered my broken car. And then the crazy thing is, they had told me they might resell it. And suddenly I was in the grips of an ethical dilemma all over again. Is this car gonna get sold to someone else? Are they going to disclose what’s wrong with it? I don’t have a lot of faith that they will do so, given all the stuff I’ve seen up to this point. And they couldn’t really tell me, but the article came out. And since then, some readers have taken it upon themselves to do some research. I got the Atlantic to publish the VIN of my car in the article. I was so worried that, you know, some poor schmuck is gonna start driving this dumb car. And someone looked up the VIN. They found the car. I think it’s in Kansas. I need to do a little more reporting. But I think someone out there is now driving this car. And I hope that they got it fixed. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. So it’s, like, operational in Kansas, not sitting on a lot somewhere. 

CHRIS COLIN: As far as I can tell at this point. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. Well, I’m sorry for your struggle on this whole thing, but I am very happy that you wrote about it and talked us through sludge because just the act of identifying and putting words around this thing that we all feel is just this great public service that I appreciate. And thanks so much for being on the show again and talking with me. I had a fun time. 

CHRIS COLIN: No, I did too. Thank you for having me. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson, and edited by Joe Rosenberg.

Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford.

Our Executive Producer is Kathy Tu. Our Senior Editor is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director.

The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson DeLeon, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.

You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our Discord server. You can find all of our past episodes at 99pi.org.

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