Thread by @patio11

I hate that this is true, but instrumentally useful: if you ever experience the symptom “I tried to get in contact with a firm but no human will talk to me” your best bet is stop following the obvious process and start cold emailing people arbitrarily high up ladder (tech) or…

… groups which by their nature need to have an open inbox and who are failing if they optimize for resolution speed over resolution accuracy (Legal, Compliance, Investor Relations, etc).

This is a) downstream of a business decision to fob certain customers off at scale and b) functions as a class competence check because firm institutionally assumes that if you’re important enough to talk to you know this w/o needing it explained to you.

This is also true of every company which is a platform, broadly defined.

Of course there are named people who make and execute decisions. If you don’t know their names, that is indicative of where you sit in their business priorities, but they very much exist and have email.

One more sociological observation:

A lot of people who report “No human will talk to me” have actually talked to a human multiple times. What they really mean is they want a professional with decisionmaking authority, but, interesting and remarkable word choice.

I have sometimes noted that to fellow PMC members and received a non-apology apology where they acknowledge that dehumanizing someone would be bad but deny doing it on the basis of not believing the human in question passed their imagined Turing test.

Which, words fail me.