WOOF!  WOOF!  The Trained Dog Syndrome 




When I moved to my apartment, I mailed out address change notices
to everyone. 

One day about two weeks later, I woke up and found I couldn't 
get online.  I called my ISP (Iquest, at the time). They said, 
"You ordered the account shut down, so we did."   
I said, "Huh?"    
"Yes, our records show a letter from you on [date] saying to cancel 
the account."  

After the problem was straightened out, I thought,
"How could anyone read a letter about an address change
and think it was a request to cancel the whole account?"

Of course, no one could; that's crazy. And this means that 
people aren't answering the snail mail.  Apparently my ISP had hired
highly trained dogs to do some of their work.   

The dogs, although working at the peak of their ability, just aren't 
able to handle something out of the ordinary.  But the company 
saves money by using them instead of human staff.

(Dogs often go by their keen sense of smell.  The odor of an 
address change is much like the scent of a cancellation notice.)

Soon I found other people had run into trained dogs too.

A friend called customer service at her credit card company to protest 
a $35 late fee.   My friend said, this charge is excessive and punitive.   
It does not cost your company $35, or even close, when you get my check 
a day late.   The woman at the other end said, "Yes it does."   
My friend asked, "How?" and the CS rep replied, 
"Because then all these people call protesting the charges, and we 
have to deal with them."    

My friend gave up and got off the phone.   

So when you encounter people trying to work beyond their competence,
you can say "Woof!  Woof!" as shorthand and feel better.   
They won't know what you mean. 

Some of the best documentation of trained dogs is found in Feynman's
books.  There is a good example when he finds a hole in the fence 
at Los Alamos, and another when he tries to warn his colleagues
about the security flaws in their file cabinet locks.  See
_Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_.

       *   *   *   *   *

The very last place to change my mailing address in their records 
was my bank.   For two years they kept sending bills to my 
old address.   I called and wrote to no avail.  

However, eventually I realized that my problem was trivial,
compared to what must be happening at their end.  I wrote to 
one of their VPs, saying I was concerned that his company was 
having such trouble with basic recordkeeping, and that I could 
only imagine how much more difficult it must be to manage money; 
that I *worried* for them.   
 
I never heard back, but the address was fixed.