Account disasters
A while ago I was tinkering with a project involving AI and voice. Google's docs linked to suggested partners.
I created an account with one. Immediately when I tried to log in it refused with an error. I sent a message to their customer service — no response — and forgot about it. A few weeks later I got a personalized email from the company: "Hi, this is John in developer relations, we noticed you made an account but never used it, can we help you?" I immediately responded, "Yes, I want to pay for your product, but I cannot log in, can you help?" Again, no response.
Epic Games made a video game store to challenge Steam, complete with exclusive games. I wanted to buy one. Their store account system was apparently shared with their existing popular games. A gamer in the past had given them my email address to play a game, and though I have always controlled my email address and had never verified any account, they would not let me create an account because they believed my email was already associated with an account.
I contacted their support and they were able to clear the association. But still I could not create an account on the store — another different person was using my email address too!? I think I went through this process with their support with maybe four accounts before I was able to create one.
Blizzard's Battle.net was in a similar state. But they won't let you contact support unless you first log in with your email address. I used the fact that I control my email address to take over the account associated with my email address, but that now means they have a verified randouser1234 account associated with my email address that does not have my purchases on it. (I have a Blizzard account from an old email address that I am attempting to get rid of.)
Someone wanted to send me some cryptocurrency. I prefer pieces of paper with pictures of US presidents, so I tried creating an account on Coinbase, which I understand to be a popular tool for turning cryptocurrency into US dollars.
After creating an account it took me to some intermediate page (I forget the details — something about account verification?) that was half blank. Digging in the browser tools I could see there was some JS exception in React that was getting caught and reported back to the server. I never successfully got an account.
Various sites now offer to use passkeys to let you sign in. I must've clicked ok in the past because whenever I tried it later I got prompted for a PIN that I didn't know, with no visible mechanism to reset it.
Thankfully in this case the guy responsible for passkeys at Google was my old officemate and he was able to walk me through it. Short answer is that Chrome on iOS can prompt you for a "Google Password Manager" PIN, but there is no way to reset it on mobile, nor via the Google Password Manager website. Instead there is a third Google Password Manager UI within desktop Chrome that I needed to use.
As posted there, once I attempted to actually use the passkey to sign into GitHub, I got an error message telling me to use a password instead. The existence of that error text means someone had to write the code that forwards you from one to the other.
For another project I wanted to be able to send a very small number of emails. A friend recommended Amazon SES, part of the AWS suite. I went to create an AWS account: "nope, your email address is already associated with an account". I click sign in using my email: "nope, no account associated with that email".
I contacted them. It's looking ominous, but at least to the extent any company's customer service has ever helped me with anything it's been Amazon, so I will not say I am doomed yet.
Forget trying to build new features that attract customers. Here I've given multiple cases where I was already ready to pay and could not do the most basic first step with these products. And I am not even a complex case.
The economies of scale with most big companies like these are that it's not even worth figuring out what any one user's problem is, it's better to just mark them off as X% lossage while trying to find new users elsewhere. I get it, but it's maddening.
My own brother did something (it's unclear, but nothing nefarious) and lost access to his Google account, which meant losing access to many personal files, and for whatever reason all their recovery processes refused him. He eventually gave up.