Context: Ruriko, the author's wife, is Japanese, and has different expectations about customer service than most Americans:

Ruriko and I, discussing how to help a third party: Ruriko: Oh you should call customer service for them. Me: It is because I want to help that I will not call customer service. I will write for them. Ruriko: Phone much faster and you can get company to agree on resolution.

[...]

Me: In this country it is very important you have a written record of agreed resolution. Ruriko: So call and ask for a receipt after it’s done. Me: No, if you don’t have the written record, it might not happen. With fairly high probability. Ruriko: What so the company *forgets.*

Me: Well it will look from the outside as if the company is forgetting. Internally it can be a miscommunication, the rep not having a clear pathway to achieve the agreed-upon resolution, or the rep saying something to get you off the phone for metrics. Ruriko: Saying right thing?

Me: Could be fibbing. Ruriko: Clearly they cannot lie at scale. Me: Contingent on being in the small percentage of customers with rare problems the likelihood that an offered resolution is confabulated is actually fairly high. Hence, paper. Ruriko: This is madness. Me: I know.

Third party (TP): They kept telling me “We’re sorry. This almost never happens.” Me: Second part is true as it goes, relative to total number of customers. TP: But why say that when it actually did happen to me. Me: Cheap way to mollify you. Many similarly situated customers…

Me: … will assume that these things just happen and they have no standing to complain. TP: They literally said “Sometimes these things happen.” Me: Yes. Now one can act regarding them as if they are simply the weather. Or one can act to resolve them. The resolutions cost money.

[...]

An aside about “weather”: There are some factors in life and business which are genuinely out of our control. Weather is the canonical example, at least prior to widespread geoengineering. Many customers berate employees about the weather. This is uncouth and unhelpful.

But some employees and companies generalize from “The weather is out of our control” to “The consequences of weather are out of our control.” This is self-evidently absurd. We all exist in a world which has weather; you can plan for it.

“And extreme weather?” Is weather, and can be planned for. Not having a plan is a choice.