99% Invisible: “Your Call Is Important to Us”

Host: Roman Mars
Guest: Chris Collin
Date: October 28, 2025

Main Theme

In this episode, Roman Mars explores the often maddening labyrinth of modern customer service—where design, bureaucracy, and corporate incentives merge to create soul-crushing obstacles for consumers. Reporter Chris Collin, fresh off a months-long battle with Ford's customer service, joins to discuss the intentional design of customer care systems that frustrate, deter, and exhaust us. The episode delves into the concept of “sludge,” the intentional friction built into systems to slow us down, discourage complaints, and reduce company costs—and even ventures into how these tactics might evolve with AI.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Saga Begins: Chris Collin’s Car Fiasco (02:17–05:28)

• Chris’ Ordeal

  • Chris Collin’s “fairly new Ford Escape” lost power suddenly while driving (02:17).
  • Mechanics and Ford itself couldn't replicate the issue, so his warranty was effectively useless (03:33).
  • Forced into a cycle of endless form-filling, waiting on hold, and being redirected, Chris’ life descended into a "cretinous ordeal" (04:09).

• Universal Suffering

  • Roman and Chris reflect on how just about everyone has faced a similarly infuriating customer service odyssey.

  "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."
  — Roman Mars (04:24)

2. Sludge: The Hidden Design of Customer Care (05:28–11:00)

• Definition & Origin

  • Sludge, coined by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, refers to anything that subtly but deliberately makes processes difficult or discouraging for consumers.
  • Roman: “It's the polar opposite of nudge” (06:18).

• Forms of Sludge

  • Endless wait times, legalese, needlessly complex forms, and customer service outsourcing are all strategic elements of sludge.
  • Chris speaks to industry insider Amas Tanuma, who exposes call center tactics: under-staffing to inflate wait times, using poor call infrastructure to encourage dropped calls, and relocating centers where labor/connection quality is cheaper (07:12–09:21).

• Frontline Reps: Victims and Perpetrators

  • Call center employees are monitored, penalized for "giving away" too many credits, and trained to suppress empathy.

  "Amas Tanuma said they're training you into being an algorithm because people are naturally empathetic. [...] 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."
  — Chris Collin (09:42–11:00)

3. The Art of the Disconnect: Is It On Purpose? (11:00–13:04)

• Intentional Dropped Calls

  • Agents are graded on “average handle time.” Hanging up is an easy method to reduce their numbers and avoid penalties.

  “What's an easy way to bring your average down? Hang up very quickly. So that's one common thing. So, yeah, those hang ups are often on purpose.”
  — Chris Collin (11:19)

• Corporate Incentives

  • No explicit order to give bad service, but the incentive system virtually guarantees it. “You don’t need a formal conspiracy. When interests align...” — referencing George Carlin (13:04).

4. Accountability and Industry Logic (13:04–16:46)

• Enforcement & Backlash

  • Occasionally agencies (e.g. CFPB against Toyota) or investigations (e.g. ProPublica on Cigna) reveal deliberate dead-ends and denial practices.

• Calculated Gamble

  • Companies bank on short-term gains (stock price, quarterly results) over long-term customer loyalty.
  • CEO tenures are shorter than ever and are rewarded by shareholder value, not customer care.

  "It's really easy to pay a company money. ... The problem is when you have a problem as an existing customer."
  — Chris Collin (15:23)

• Consumer Complicity

  • As Chris notes (via Amas), “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.” (16:46)

• Roman counters: The system is designed to keep us stuck; changing it isn’t so easy (16:58).

5. Societal Risks: When Sludge Gets Dangerous (17:05–18:31)

• Sludge Beyond Commerce

  • The same tactics are applied to public services—Medicaid, SNAP, insurance—where the stakes are much higher.
  • Increasing bureaucracy and "prove-you-deserve-it" requirements mean many lose out on essential benefits.

  "There are people who are getting screwed out of insurance, out of SNAP benefits, out of all kinds of benefits they're entitled to... and the consequences are huge."
  — Chris Collin (17:48)

6. The History and Future of Sludge (21:09–25:11)

• Sludge’s Surprising Roots

  • Chris finds a 1940s U.S. manual distributed to sabotagers in Nazi-occupied Europe: teaching them to weaponize incompetence—recommendations like losing tools, raising unnecessary topics, subtly slowing the enemy down (21:09–22:11).
  • He draws parallels between this manual and the sludge built into today’s customer service.

  “This is what they are doing to us. This is sludge in a nutshell."
  — Chris Collin (22:11)

• AI and Tomorrow’s Sludge

  • "It’s not going to be good. ... AI is about to make things way, way worse."
    — Chris Collin (22:52)
  • Companies misinterpret customer tolerance of AI as acceptance, and are ramping up AI-based hurdles.

  “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.”
  — Chris Collin (23:00)

7. Strategies and Sludge Audits (25:11–26:40)

• Old Workarounds Don’t Work
  • Tactics like saying “operator” or pressing 0 are largely obsolete; companies now force you back to clunky web systems.
• A DMV Success Story
  • Roman shares a positive DMV experience—efficient, transparent, fair—thanks to likely “sludge audits” (26:11).
  • Chris notes some organizations now analyze (“audit”) their bureaucratic processes to reduce unnecessary friction.

8. Turning Sludge into Nudge: "Admin Night" (26:40–29:19)

• Admin Night Concept

  • Chris invented "Admin Night": Friends gather, bring their paperwork and to-do lists, and handle their bureaucratic chores together, pausing for social breaks.
  • Celebrates “daylighting” sludge—naming it and tackling it collectively.

  "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 it."
  — Chris Collin (29:19)

  • Roman: "You're turning a sludge into nudge. It's pretty great.” (29:01)

9. Closing the Loop & Lingering Questions (29:35–31:09)

• Chris’ Resolution

  • After 100+ days fighting Ford, he finally got a buyback—but worries his problematic car will end up foisted on another unsuspecting owner.

  "I didn't turn into the guy ... 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."
  — Chris Collin (29:45)

• Public Service

  • Roman thanks Chris for helping articulate and dissect the “sludge” phenomenon—a private misery made public and relatable.

Notable Quotes

• "We are living in a state of f it."
  — Chris Collin (04:54)

• "Sludge is basically the stuff that slows us down. It's friction, it's legalese, it's needless complexity."
  — Chris Collin (05:54)

• "If folks are discouraged from getting whatever they're owed, then what's the point of the policy?"
  — Chris Collin (06:47)

• "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."
  — Chris Collin (25:11)

• "Just the act of identifying and putting words around this thing that we all feel is just this great public service that I appreciate."
  — Roman Mars (31:09)

Timestamps of Important Segments

• 02:17 — Chris Collin’s car unexpectedly fails, his journey begins.
• 04:09 — "Cretinous ordeal": Chris descends into corporate phone-maze hell.
• 05:54 — Introduction and definition of “sludge.”
• 07:12 — Insider Amas Tanuma reveals tricks of the call center trade.
• 11:19 — Dropped calls are deliberate: reducing "average handle time."
• 13:04 — George Carlin quote, system isn’t a conspiracy; it’s built on aligned interests.
• 17:48 — How sludge harms the most vulnerable (SNAP, Medicaid, etc.).
• 21:09 — WWII sabotage manual: the ancestor of sludge.
• 22:52 — AI is poised to make things worse, not better.
• 26:11 — Roman’s unusually positive DMV experience; sludge audits.
• 27:01 — “Admin Night” concept for tackling bureaucracy collectively.
• 29:45 — Chris’ car saga conclusion.
• 31:09 — The value of “daylighting” sludge.

Tone & Language

• Roman Mars’ classic blend of dry humor, curiosity, and clarity grounds the conversation.
• Chris Collin is forthright, wry, self-deprecating, and at times—righteously indignant.
• The episode is conversational, empathetic, and occasionally cathartic in its “we’ve all been there” moments.

Memorable Moments

• Chris realizing that call disconnects are “often on purpose” and the mutual commiseration—both funny and despairing (11:19).
• The story of the WWII sabotage manual and its eerie resemblance to modern customer service (21:09).
• Chris proselytizing “Admin Night” as a hopeful, communal response to bureaucratic misery (27:07).

Summary

This episode of 99% Invisible peels back the curtain on the intentional design of frustrating customer service and bureaucracy. Borrowing the concept of “sludge” from behavioral economics, Roman Mars and Chris Collin illuminate the hidden architecture built to slow you down, wear you out, and reduce your willingness to fight for what you're owed. With wary looks to the past (WWII sabotage) and the future (AI), they identify both bleak trends and small sources of hope—like collective “admin nights” and improved bureaucracy where someone bothered to conduct a “sludge audit.” The result is a richly reported, relatable anatomy of the maddening, invisible forces that rule our daily lives.