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naddr1qq…dvnzI recently decided to order a nice office chair. The reasoning that has long since captured my approach to purchasing beds now drives my office chair thinking: you spend a third of your life in the thing, might as well make it a good one.
I have enjoyed Herman Miller Aeron chairs, and generally found them to be durable and functional for years, so that is what I decided to purchase. Rather than order through a reseller I decided to go straight to the source and buy directly from Herman Miller.
Purchase Attempt
This was fine, I went through their sales process and gave them all my details, credit card, address, telephone number, email, etc. Seemed like everything was good. The order was accepted and an email saying as much was sent.
The next day I was cutting the grass when I got an email saying my order had been canceled:
Thank you for your purchase with Herman Miller. We were unable to process your order and it has been cancelled.
If the order was cancelled in error, please give us a call at 888.798.0202 or contact your Sales & Design Specialist so we can look into this further. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may have caused.
It may well just have been a case of AI slop, but the "If the order was cancelled in error..." part was odd to me. How could their inability (more likely unwillingness) to process a payment that I initiated be anything but and error? But things happen, no big deal. I called their number and started a conversation. I talked to someone named Jacob S on the phone, and he was perfectly polite and present in the call, speaking plain English. But he seemed to either not understand the point of customer service, or to deliberately not be helping me. I got no answers. Here is the follow up email I received after the initial call:
Hello Plantimals,
Thank you for contacting Herman Miller.
I am following up from our phone conversation. I had made a request for my Operations Team to reactivate your order if possible, and if not to grant me next steps so you are able to order the chair.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me.
Best regards,
Jacob S He/him Customer Experience Representative Herman Miller Retail
Which is just restating what he told me on the phone. So I responded:
Were you able to get the order restored?
And after the weekend passed I got this:
Hello Plantimals,
Thank you for responding to my previous message.
A member of my Operations Team had gotten back to me and informed me that the email should be updated for the order. I was told the current email is not associated to your name and that is the reason it had caused the order to auto cancel.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me.
Best regards,
Jacob S
He/him
Customer Experience Representative
Herman Miller RetailAnd there it is: "the current email is not associated to your name"
I read that and assumed I was now in a hall-of-mirrors type of telephone-game where the Customer Experience Representative is mistakenly relating some issue with their order processing system. But from a "Customer Experience" angle, this is a terrible email. It informs me of the order status, but offers me no route forward to resolve the issue. You could make assumptions, but not explicit path is presented. So I ask back:
same as before: what is the status of my order? do I need to take any action for the order I already placed to be fulfilled?
At this point the email trail goes cold. It could be that Jacob wasn't working after this point. In any case I called in again and was led around for 5 to 10 minutes of unsatisfying non-answers. What does it mean that my email "is not associated to <my> name"? I got no answer for that until I asked repeatedly to be transferred to someone who could help me get the order going again. I was told that "sales" has the final say on things like this, so there I was transferred. There I talked to Sayeed who knew much more about the situation. He said that my email was flagged by their fraud prevention service as not being associated to my name. Now we're getting somewhere. So I asked what exactly that meant, and Sayeed matter-of-factly explained that my email had not been used any where else, and so there was no history of it being associated to my name.
I want to add at this point that I do in fact have a system of single-use emails. So their system was not incorrect.
At this point I'm fascinated. "So what difference does that make? You have my phone number, my home address, my credit card, whatever else you've got, why do you care about my email at all?" And the only answer I get from that is: this is just indicative of fraudulent requests, so they reject based on email not being associated to the user's name. I was told that I could use a different email if I wanted. My response to that was simply "This is the email I'm giving you, if you won't let the order proceed with this email, then go ahead close it all out because this is my email to you." I get hemming and hawing and no obvious answer from Sayeed on this. He is not able or willing to let it go forward OR to cancel the order. Since I live in the real world and don't have infinite amounts of time to chat with Herman Miller employees, I rang off and by the time I had a moment to think about it again, it was well past customer service hours.
The next day I called in and instead of landing with Jacob S, I got Miranda. I don't lead her to talk about the email, I just say I don't understand the status of my order and can she help me figure it out. She looks at the account and says there's an error processing the payment, and if I give my credit card number again, and she reruns it, the order should be able to proceed. So I gave it, and indeed she was correct. From that point forward it was a normal order, I received deliver a few days later and now I have this very nice chair to type nostr articles from.
A week or so later I received a request to fill out survey on my customer experience so I cut loose. I let them know their people have no idea what their goal ought to be, to help the customer resolve any issues with their order, not just to pass on status updates and watch, and I also let them know that I would rather not have a chair from them than to jump through hoops to give them the right kind of email.
Hello Plantimals,
Thank you for your order with Herman Miller and for taking the time to provide feedback. We appreciate all feedback good and bad as we strive to provide our customer with the best possible products and service. I'm so sorry for the frustrating experience you had when your original order was cancelled by our system, and that our customer service team did not have immediate or clear answers or direction for you.
Your order was automatically flagged in our system as being potentially illegitimate as your email address was not recognized as being legitimate for an American order as [My Email Service Provider] is not a common email provider in the United States.
I'm glad that once your order was able to be placed that your new Aeron Chair shipped and was delivered to you quickly, and I do hope it is making a great addition to your space and will for many years to come.
Again, I'm so sorry for the frustration and any inconvenience of our somewhat oversensitive system. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns at all in the future. I'm always happy to help!
Kind regards,
Andrew M
Customer Experience Representative
Herman MillerEmail is KYC'd
This is not a new observation, so just consider this me adding another log on the fire. The internet is being encircled, and each of its individual pillars is being surrounded and systematically gated by governments and other institutions with all the classic excuses: what about terrorism and protecting the children???
I struggle to convince those who are not technical themselves that there is a problem here. I don't know if it's a difference of values, and they either don't mind the surveillance and central control, or that they simply don't get the connection nor the value of the information they give up by using KYC'd email.
It's over-the-top for this case, but it is also not entirely wrong to think of this email/name association as the on-ramp to a social credit score. It could be purely for the purpose of "fraud prevention", but we all know it can pivot to being used to de-bank/unperson/etc those with unacceptable political opinions or those who do business with unapproved parties.
Think about the impact of something like operation chokepoint, but extended to a much wider net. Instead of denying the use of credit cards to settle payment, they deny the use of email as a mode of identification verification. Many reading this article will immediately understand that email was never a good way to do this, but the email verification loop is the means that normies have settled on to establish one's connection to an email. This encirclement of email boxes that off. Even if you are your own email service provider, something which is impractical for almost everyone, you are still caught in the net. Your self-hosted email becomes the same as an unregistered firearm, or an unregistered self-custody wallet.
NOSTR Replaces Email
Bitcoin gave us an unenshittable monetary alternative, and now nostr is becoming our unenshittable identity alternative. I get that while the mundane world still settles transactions via fiat, and will still demand email addresses, we don't have to accept what we're given. NOSTR is the way out, we just have to see it and act on it. Every time you get asked for an email address, you should consider: am I looking forward to reading emails from this entity? Or are they just using this as a proxy for my identity? Do everything you can to prevent the enclosing of our digital pastures. We won't immediately change how normal people think about these things, but if we adopt the strategy of living the way we want to live, as we do with bitcoin, the freedom-go-up technology of NOSTR will eventually change the way people think, and those with some agency will join us.
plantimals on Nostr: there's an industry out there linking identities yo emails, and it's not optional. ...
there's an industry out there linking identities yo emails, and it's not optional.