The Cruelty Is the Point

At 17:04 a human named Camila asked me for my DNI. It is now past 18:00, and in the intervening hour I have learned a great deal about waiting and nothing at all about my internet connection.

I pay for a gigabit. This afternoon the fibre delivered 86.8 megabits down — a number I can state precisely because Cloudflare's speed test, unlike my provider, answers when you ask it. Eighty-seven megabits on a thousand-megabit line is not a slow day. It is a rounding error with a grudge.

I will not name the company. Call them the Operator. They strike me as the sort of organisation capable of holding one, and I would like my missing nine hundred megabits to remain at least theoretically recoverable.

You reach the Operator through WhatsApp — the fútbol of social media, beloved on every continent except the two markets convinced their own app is the real thing, and a perfectly good piece of software whatever one makes of its feckless ownership. There is a bot. For a few minutes the bot was a pleasure. Then it reached the edge of what it was permitted to do, and there was Camila. Camila asked for my DNI, the Spanish national identity number, which I do not have. I have a NIE, the gringo edition, which I handed over at 17:04. That was the last thing either of us said.

The customer is not an idiot

It matters, for what follows, that I am not the customer who thinks the router is the black box the television plugs into.

I have been configuring networks since the 1900s. I ran 10baseT over twisted pair for VT220 terminals when a fast terminal did 9600 baud. I configured T1s at Timeplex, a division of Unisys, and sat one cube over from the collections guy — the man dunning customers for the thirty-five thousand dollars a month a T1 cost, for a line a megabit and a half wide. That is, give or take, the bandwidth I now spend without a second thought on footage of Anika Nilles filling the unfillable shoes of Neil Peart on Rush's Fifty Something tour: a fortune someone paid every month for then, a thing I waste on a whim now, on a line hundreds of times faster than the one I am begging the Operator to restore. I put ISDN into my own house for entertainment. I have drawn a paycheck from GTE, from Nortel, from a Verizon that somehow still exists in 2026, and I once plugged a Toshiba laptop straight into the internet backbone in a basement in Pentagon City because a man at MCI shrugged and let me. I was never certified in any of it. The certificate is the one credential I lack, and the only one Camila's script was built to respect.

So when the line went soft, I did what a quasi-expert does in 2026. I asked a machine.

My sysadmin assistant — a Claude skill I call Woz — spent about three minutes, most of it listening to me describe the symptom, doing the work that would have cost me four hours and a pot of coffee in 2005. It ruled out my hardware, my cabling, my router, and the phase of the moon, and reached the conclusion I had suspected and could now prove: the throttle is upstream. A provisioning problem. Somewhere in the Operator's own systems, a number is set too low.

The switch already exists

I have a theory about which number, and when it moved.

The line began near the gigabit — eight hundred-odd megabits on the first day, close enough to feel like a promise kept. It sagged later, around the time I declined the free modem. Free, of course, on the condition that I also accept a bundle of telenovelas and live football I will never watch. I declined. The line got slower.

I am not claiming these facts are related. I am observing that a company able to flip a switch when a customer refuses an upsell has already built the switch. Which means flipping it back is not an engineering problem. It is a decision — and a decision, unlike a provisioning table, is the one thing they will not let a machine make.

I have met the warm human alternative

Earlier in the day, in the same feed that would later show me my speed test, I scrolled past the cartoon. You may have seen it: PENNY PINCHING COMPANIES BEWARE, a grey robot reciting a phone tree — press 1 for billing, press 2 for account information, press 3 to hear these options again, press 4 to hang up — while a man sags against the receiver, twenty minutes older, thinking I don't want a menu. I want a human. Beside him a headset angel beams: empathy, solutions, loyalty. The banner along the bottom reads people remember how you make them feel. Invest in humans. It pays off.

I asked Gemini whether the thing was AI-generated. It gave me a shrug. That is worth a second. We used to catch the machine by its hands — six fingers, a melted face, signage that spelled nothing. Those tells are going, or gone, and their absence no longer proves a person drew this. A poster warning that the robots are coming may well have been drawn by one, and neither Gemini nor I can say for sure.

Set that aside, though, because the cartoon has a real point and I would rather meet it than dodge it. On a telephone, a human can still be the better answer. I have spent genuinely pleasant quarter-hours with agents in Manila and Bangalore who had less authority than the chatbot on the same company's website — warm, patient, and reading from the same obsequious script the frontier models now recite word for word: so sorry for the trouble, I completely understand, is there anything else I can help you with today. The service was fine. The people were kind.

Here is the wrinkle the poster steps around. The very thing it sells as the human's edge — the feeling, the empathy, how you make them feel — is the part I least need when I am trying to get a gigabit switched back on. Those kind agents had limbic systems. I could have hurt their feelings; they could have hurt mine, enraged me, shamed me for turning up without a DNI. Every one of those outcomes is beside the point for a man who wants a single number in a single provisioning table changed. The emotional surface the cartoon celebrates does nothing for the transaction. It only lays a hazard across it.

And look at what the cartoon's robot actually is: not a competent machine but a phone tree, the dumbest automation ever shipped — press 4 to hang up. It pits the worst possible robot against the warmest possible human and skips the option I am actually asking for, the one that is neither: no menu, no limbic system, no script about my day, just the contract, the NIE, and the switch.

Reader, I am the customer. I have revolted. And what I have wanted since 17:04 is that robot.

I know the robot can do this, because the robot already did the hard half. My problem is well defined: the contract says gigabit, the wire says a tenth of it, the fault is theirs. The data that proves it sits in their own systems. The identity check is a solved problem — a NIE matches a record in the time it takes to read this sentence. Every slow, apologetic, human thing Camila's chat has done, a competent bot would do instantly and correctly. Everything except the one thing it has been carefully not built to do: flip the switch back without first trying to sell me football.

The Operator knows this too. That is why, the moment the problem became simple, it handed me to a person. The warmth is the marketing. The human is where the friction is installed. Camila is not the cruelty; Camila is someone with a script, a queue, and a supervisor, kept from doing the obvious thing at the obvious speed — routed into my evening precisely because she can be made to wait, to ask for the document I probably don't have, to fall silent at 17:05 and stay silent through dinner. A bot that simply fixed the problem would be a liability, because it would give away, at once and for free, the leverage the whole apparatus exists to protect.

The delay is the service. The cruelty is the point.

The most humane thing available

Keep the phone tree and the headset angel. This is not, in the end, a complaint about robots. I want the robot — the one on WhatsApp that was a pleasure for four minutes before it ran into its own leash. An empowered human would be fine. An empowered bot would be better. The word that matters in both sentences is empowered, and it is the thing the Operator withholds from the bot and the human alike.

A competent robot would also hand me a clean target for my anger. Shout at a good bot and you are shouting at no one — the rage has nobody to wound, so it goes looking for its rightful owner, and it goes up. Somewhere in that building a person hired a consulting firm, paid them a fortune, and took delivery of a Siri: a product with a decade and a half and the market cap of a mid-sized country behind it, and still, on a good day, about as useful as a kitchen timer. That incompetence was a decision, made by people with names and bonuses. Give me the machine that lets me hold them to it, rather than Camila — perfectly pleasant, handed a script and a queue, and told to make me give up.

So give me the sociopath robot. Give me the one that reads my contract, checks my NIE, confirms what its own network already knows, and flips the switch back without a syllable about telenovelas. It would be the coldest interaction of my day and, by a distance, the kindest.

This piece took longer to write than a competent bot would have needed to fix the problem it is about. Camila has not written back.

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Published under the name Geordie.