
Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role - morphics
http://kotaku.com/zynga-mistake-puts-random-stranger-in-customer-support-664780630
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goatforce5
I've owned a domain for 10+ years that's spelled correctly and is kinda neat
and i'll do something with it some day. A few years back a start up got some
funding, tried to buy my domain several times, and ended up going with a
variation of the domain, but minus a vowel. eg, if i owned flicker.com, they
ended up with flickr.com (it's neither of those domains, BTW).

I semi-regularly get support emails for them. If i'm in a good mood and see
the email as it comes in, i'll tell them the correct email to use (no one has
ever thanked me for that, as it happens). Normally I just ignore them, or
don't notice them for a few days.

I find it mildly amusing when there's a series of emails from the same person
with panic escalating over a few hours.

"Where is my project?"

"I need this for my report in the morning!"

"I'M GOING TO SUE YOU!"

~~~
lostlogin
Gawd. I used to have a phone with attached fax that was one digit off a
popular fish and chip shop number. I would get advertising faxes at the rate
of about 1 roll of fax paper per week from an advertising company. I rung,
faxed emailed and tried multiple times to correct them. In the end I got one
of their faxes, faxed it back to them, then tapped the bit that came out the
fax to the bit still going in. A vicious fax loop. It ran all weekend. I got
one grumpy as fax back on Monday about how I'd used up a massive roll of fax
paper, and they had been unable to delete the queue for some reason, so it had
used up the refills too. $$ Were demanded. The spam faxes stopped and I never
heard from them again.

~~~
PakG1
LOL, that reminds me of the time my work number was one digit off from the
company switchboard. I worked for a telecom doing .NET stuff. So surprised I
am when a mobile phone customer calls me at 2am in a panic that he had lost
his phone. Three questions ran through my mind: how did he know I worked for
the company, how did he get my personal number, and why did he think I could
help him? After a few more instances, I realized these people weren't calling
my personal number, they were fat fingering my work number, which was
forwarded to my mobile. It was so weird until I figured that out.

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DanBC
See also the English comedian Tony Hawks and the US skateboarder Tony Hawk.

([http://www.tony-hawks.com/skateboarding.php](http://www.tony-
hawks.com/skateboarding.php))

([http://tonyhawk.com/](http://tonyhawk.com/))

~~~
Svip
The strangest thing is that the only email, specifically accusing Tony Hawks
of abusing his name's similarity to Tony Hawk is in Dutch. Likely, however, Mr
Hawks has received numerous complaints about it in English and chose to ignore
those, but kept the one in Dutch as he did not understand it (or did not care
what it said).

~~~
TallGuyShort
It's not the he didn't understand or didn't care what he said. It's that he
had a funny response. It's his own name, for Heaven's sake. And the people
writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence either.

~~~
tripzilch
> And the people writing to him are clearly not doing their own due diligence
> either.

The people writing to him are eight years old. And he is making fun of their
inability to spell.

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mattkevan
A friend of mine's surname is the same as a large US private bank. He bought
the .com address for his own company years before the bank got online and so
regularly receives emails from the bank's customers containing sensitive
information, including financial data, account numbers, SSNs and more.

He's told the bank many times that their customers are sending stuff that
really shouldn't be in an email to the wrong address, offered to set up
redirects or even sell them the domain, but do they care?

Not one bit.

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PakG1
See also
[http://www.salon.com/2002/06/03/nissan/](http://www.salon.com/2002/06/03/nissan/)

edit: better article: [http://www.yalelawtech.org/ip-in-the-digital-age/why-
nissan-...](http://www.yalelawtech.org/ip-in-the-digital-age/why-nissan-com-
isn%E2%80%99t-a-car-website/)

~~~
otoburb
The money Nissan spent on legal fees may have been better spent buying his
business outright.

It may still have legs if they can put a value not having control over
nissan.com.

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kiisupai
Zynga Mistake Puts Random Stranger In Chief Executive Officer Role

~~~
ordinary
Seven Year Old Girl Wanders Into White House, Sworn In As President Of The
United States

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willvarfar
So Zynga was originally going to call the game "Themepark" but Eric already
had that domain, and so they changed it to "Coasterville"?

~~~
sam_pointer
From experience, it is quite common to have internal code-names for Facebook
games for the purposes of preventing leaks from development canvas apps and
the like. These are usually related to the general gist of the game. To coin a
made-up example, 'SimAir' might be called 'flying' internally.

~~~
brazzy
My experience has been that the main reason is that development usually starts
before marketing has even decided on the final name. You need to call your dev
servers, code repository and bug tracker project _something_ and it's often
hard to change retroactively.

It's not even unusual to see multiple different working titles float around.

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josscrowcroft
Wonderful - so much mischief potential... I love that the user was told to
press "meh" repeatedly.

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nicholassmith
I think I'd do the exact same thing in his situation, you can either be angry
about it or have some fun with it.

~~~
panacea
They're semi-funny reply emails, but I don't really understand how he was
having fun with them. Doing it for the lulz of punking individual users trying
to get help?

Seems a bit like being a bully on an individual kid.

Possibly cathartic though if he's being swamped by misdirected support
emails... maybe?

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ChuckMcM
Sadly my favorite story about a person dealing with a motel with nearly the
same number turned out to be false. It was still funny though. I like this
guy's sense of humor but he could include in the end of his response the real
address (or set the reply-to on his responses to be the actual address)

~~~
Widdershin
I worked in a 24/7 technical support center, which one was number off my
country's major airline. The amount of times I had to inform people, that just
because they'd managed to call a software company in my country, didn't mean
that I could change their flights.

You would get people who would call up, launch into a rigmarole about their
booking, I would listen for a few minutes before interrupting and saying 'You
are aware that this is Company Name, right?', and they would still keep going.
Fun stuff.

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ddunkin
Trying to actually reach intelligent humans at these large companies can be a
real pain. I've had similar issues with large providers doing stupid things,
my customers blame me, and I can't do anything about it because I'm the small
guy.

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bbguitar
LOL worth a read for a quick grin.

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jon_black
What's a random stranger anyway? I'd imagine that all strangers are random,
right? By definition, you have no acquaintance with them, so you can't predict
them.

Anyway, I thought it was an oxymoron. Maybe I'm just being random ;)

~~~
acangiano
By following your own logic, it wouldn't be an oxymoron. It would be a
pleonasm.

~~~
jon_black
Pleonasm. That's a new word for me. Thanks.

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mpr3
I know it just isn't possible in many situations, but transparent support goes
a long way in avoiding situations like this. Zendesk has tried this out with
fully visible support chat, and it's worked well for them.

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cinbun8
Misleading those users was unnecessary. From the user's perspective they are
stuck between Zynga and Eric who decided to have some fun with them.

I wonder how much time he had on his hands to toy around with feedback emails
everyday. Would an email filter with an automatic response not have sufficed ?

~~~
fastball
Users of Zynga products deserve a wake up call.

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CurtMonash
I get several emails per year that are meant for monash.edu. I simply write
back pointing that out. I most definitely do NOT say "If you can't tell the
difference between .com and .edu, you're unlikely to have much joy with the
Monash University admissions office."

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instakill
Not to be a party-pooper but I wonder where he stands legally with this.

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eterm
What an asshole. I mean, really, people contact him asking for help and
instead of setting up an email rule of "Sorry, this isn't Zynga" he knowingly
messes people around.

It'd be one thing to mess with Zynga but people who've just emailed for help?
That breaks "Dont' be a dick".

I was expecting an awesome story about how he looked into the game and took on
their role and actually helped people but instead we have someone on the
internet being a dick.

~~~
bru
Excuse me? It is stated that he did the right thing first:

> When Zynga didn't reply to his messages pointing out the error, he started
> doing their job for them.

He then decided to play along, and that it his right. He did not say "delete
system32" or such things. The asshole here is Zynga more than Eric I'd say.

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speeder
Troll.programmer? Placeholder forgotten there? How.the guy email.ended there
in first place?

EDIT: whooo! I write a question, downvote-fest!!!

For context, I was the first comment, and I was genuinely curious. But thanks
for the downvotes and no reply.

~~~
codesuela
random punctuation along with missing words (probably caused by autocorrect)
makes your post extremely unreadable hence the downvotes

~~~
speeder
Too bad I cannot edit it again now that I am on a computer :( (I typed it on a
phone)

~~~
tokipin
this is not excuse. i write like an idiot that never graduated grade school
regardless of whether i'm pecking on a phone or on a keyboard. much to learn
you still have

