I’ve had that happen before, but that’s not actually what happened here. The timebank did activate, I just had only about 3 seconds remaining it. The most likely explanation is certainly that I’d used it on a previous hand, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t. It isn’t something I do often, it was only about 10 minutes into the tournament, I had no recollection of it, and I scanned back through the chat log and saw no mention of my having requested time.

Makes sense and interesting read, thanks! Not that I’ve read it, but this reminds me of what I understand to be the premise of Sklansky’s new book, “DUCY?”: always consider the motivations and incentives of anyone you’re dealing with.

Speaking from experience…

When an organization becomes large enough, it’s almost inevitable that the mission of the frontline CS personnel will shift, without anyone realizing it, from solving customer’s problems to just getting tickets closed. There are various reasons why that happens, and they vary by organization, but it almost always happens and is very difficult to prevent.

The wording of AB’s emaill gave him no chance at all. Asking for help understanding a problem just gives CS an excuse to blow him off with a boilerplate response, even if they know it’s probably a real bug. They get to close the ticket, which makes their numbers look good and keeps them from getting yelled at by stressed out techies and programmers who already have a pile of bug reports to deal with, and they know most customers won’t follow up.

I would have put “Time Bank Bug” in the subject line, and in the body written something like “I had not used my time bank prior to this and should have had the full allotment. This bug may have cost me a lot of money.” I’ve found with both PS and FTP that you have to use scary words like that to get them to forward this stuff to the people who actually know how to deal with it. Otherwise you just get the boilerplate dustoff.