↗ Reply to: Boring and dangerous professional
• 300 words • 2 min
Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You and How to Unsubscribe from Modern Luxury:
I don’t want to bother people like this; I think it’s unreasonably rude. I still start with the official support channels and escalate gradually. I like Patrick McKenzie’s strategy of presenting oneself as a boring, dangerous professional. However, I have also found that in the Annoyance Economy, one of the ways to get things done is to find specific people with power, and annoy them right back.
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Instead, you want to communicate with the bank in a manner which suggests that you’re an organized professional who is capable of escalating the matter if the bank does not handle it themselves. You do not yell – not that you’re ever verbally speaking with anyone, but you wouldn’t yell in a letter, either. You do not bluster. (“I will tell on you to my attorney” is, generally, bluster, and that’s bluster that is common to people who do not actually have attorneys.) You instead present as if you’re collecting a paper trail.
Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department.
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The thing which causes regulatory incidents is well-organized people taking paper trails to regulators which allow a regulator to trivially follow up with an investigatory letter. Accordingly, anyone who sounds like a well-organized professional with a paper trail is a problem to be swiftly addressed.
This is gold. Do you already have your own pkm? I recommend LogSeq or Obsidian.