Why Can’t Online Companies Function in the Real World?

As much as people love Google, Amazon, Facebook and all the other glam companies of the Web, it’s obvious that most of these companies can’t deal with the real world. My issue with Google’s deindexing practices are just one example. Here’s another:

EBay logic does not compute details how someone set up a fake EBay account using a woman’s maiden name. The woman had never been on EBay even once, let alone opened an account on it. But when a collection agency contacted her about money she owed EBay, she was unable to reach anyone at EBay, because, you guessed it, she doesn’t have an EBay account.

Fortunately for her, she’s a newspaper columnist named Julia Spitz, and she wrote about her problem with EBay. One of her readers knew how to get EBay to call her, though it is unclear whether the debt was forgiven.

As Spitz says, “I’m sure the woman who talked to me will probably lose her job for breaking the company’s firm policy of not actually interacting with people.”

Sarcastic, yes, but also telling. Why is it that companies like Google and EBay seem to think they only need to operate in the digital part of the world?