I learned something the other day; Amazon has actual human support staff that you can talk to via online chat or via phone! I learned this because I myself was having an Amazon-related problem, and discovered the option for human support. Surprised and intrigued, I forged ahead. The result was not surprising to me: My problem remained unresolved. At the end, I was asked to rate my experience, out of 5, in a few different categories.

Now, my problem was not resolved. To be fair, I have been known to have quite fringe problems. For example, where your problem might be “my computer isn’t turning on”, my problem would be “1 time out of 20 my computer restarts in the middle of booting but otherwise runs flawlessly”. In fact, I’m experiencing that problem at this very moment! Thing is, it isn’t causing much of an issue, so I’m gonna just let it fly. What do you think I am? Made of time? Leave that to those “pc master race” nerds. I actually have a life.

Related: Stop Wasting your Life Looking for the 'Perfect' Smartphone

So, I had an Amazon-related problem, and it remained unresolved after my chat session had ended. I had a decision to make: Do I tell the truth and give the support agent less than 5 stars because my problem wasn’t resolved, or do I accept that my issues go above the heads of level 1 support agents, and give him 5 stars because he was doing his best?

Then it hit me: What difference does it make? Will my issue be magically solved by giving this lowly support agent, likely living in horrendous poverty and just trying to feed his family, a bad score on this customer support survey? What could that achieve for me in any way? I will never hear from or talk to this person again in my life, and yet I risk them losing their jobs because I had a slight problem in my otherwise perfect life? Come on.

If a support agent didn’t solve your problem, it likely isn't because of malice or ineptitude. They deal with hundreds of rich morons like you and me every day, all complaining about problems that the agent wishes they had, some of those people yelling and carrying on as if the agent personally caused their issue, and yet they remain calm to a fault. I’ve never seen anything like it.

These people are professionals and they want to help solve your problem. The issue is that the systems that the support agents use (computer access, appointment booking, followup remainders, etc) are not robust, and make it difficult or impossible to solve many types of queries. Their company doesn’t empower them to solve anything outside of basic issues because that would require investment in computer systems and other back-end changes - no company wants to invest in infrastructure that customers won’t even see. They’d rather invest in things that affect the customer experience or otherwise make them money. The unfortunate side effect here is that any customer that does have an issue may have a hard time getting that issue resolved.

So we get to the crux of the matter: Don’t blame the service agent when the company is at fault. Their hands are tied and you’ll have them suffer for it? I mentioned earlier the idea of an agent getting fired for less-than-perfect survey review scores. You might think that that sounds preposterous, but why do you think those surveys exist? It’s to weed out the lowest-performing support agents and replace them with someone else. No-one is looking at these metrics for any other reason. No agent is getting a bonus because 100% of their surveys were 5 stars this month. These people are expendable - why waste money on rewards? The survey ratings are totaled and averaged and the lowest-performing employees are let go. That’s it.

You may think that that’s a good thing, that people shouldn’t be rewarded for poor performance by being allowed to keep their jobs. If you hold this attitude, you should ask yourself: Why do you care? Are the affairs of Amazon or AT&T or any other thousands of companies around the world, companies that use cheap third-world labour for whatever they can (chat support in this case), so important to you, that you’ll have a someone cut off from the income they and their family depend on? No reasoning can justify that.

What these people work for is a big faceless company that (as we already established) restricts them from doing their jobs properly. No-one should be punished for this. Even If these people are doing their jobs badly, you shut up and give them five stars. Is your $5 charge back so god damn important? Your package will arrive a single day later than what was promised, and you deem this such a personal slight that you would send multiple people to the poor house? Not a first-world poor house, mind you. Our poor house is just some dump in a bad neighborhood where you’re stuck with a PlayStation 2 and an Andriod phone from 2014 with a cracked screen. Imagine like 8 levels of poor below that.

Mr. Big Shot over here is using soulless corporations to bully people who never did anything to him, into starvation and puke, just because he didn’t get his Nintendo Switch in 48 hours. Oh, cry me a river! These people are doing the best with what they have, in a system designed for them to fail, for customers who couldn’t care less, and a corporation that wants them gone as soon as possible. Just give them the god damn good review.

They didn’t create your problem, and they don’t have the power to solve it. They have done nothing but dare to try to feed their poor families. Is that such a crime? If nothing else, constantly giving every employee a good review will cause headaches for the system designed to fire people for getting a few slightly negative reviews. You can mess with corporations - and it’s that what this is really all about?