Customer-Service Cluelessness: “Until a few years ago, my wife was a plastic surgeon. She quit for a lot of reasons, but one was the frustration of getting reimbursement from the HMOs.

(…)

And on it would go, until her career felt as though it were half surgery, and half paperwork.

From my outsider’s perspective, it looked like she had stumbled onto a new American business model: passive-aggressive robbery.

Unfortunately, now, in the age of high-tech services, it looks as though the practice has spread to other industries.” —David Pogue, New York Times [via walker]