The cursor blinks. It pulses with a rhythmic, digital arrogance against the white background of the login field. I am sitting in my studio, surrounded by the skeletal remains of a Victorian manor at 1:12 scale, trying to figure out if I can submerge a specific type of LED in resin without short-circuiting the entire third floor. To find the answer, I have navigated through four layers of a ‘Customer Success Portal’ only to be met with a gate. It demands a 12-character password. It requires one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one numerical digit, and a special character that does not appear in the Cyrillic alphabet. All this for the privilege of reading a 3-sentence FAQ about waterproof seals. It is 2:01 AM, and I am losing a war against a corporation that doesn’t know I exist.
Friction, when it serves no purpose other than to slow down the journey, is a form of violence against the human spirit.
Yesterday, I won an argument with my apprentice about the necessity of hand-sanding every individual shingle on a dollhouse roof. I told him that the friction of the manual process creates a soul in the object that no laser-cutter can replicate. I was wrong. I was deeply, fundamentally wrong, but I won because I have more experience and a louder voice. The truth is that friction, when it serves no purpose other than to slow down the journey, is a form of violence against the human spirit. This digital portal is the ultimate manifestation of that unnecessary friction. It is a masterpiece of architectural cruelty designed by people who view the customer not as a human with a problem to solve, but as a unit of cost that must be deflected at all costs.
The Painted-On Door Illusion
As a dollhouse architect, my life is defined by the integrity of small spaces. If a door in one of my houses doesn’t open smoothly, the entire illusion is shattered. If a miniature chair is off by 1 millimeter, the perspective of the whole room feels nauseating. Corporations, however, have mastered the art of the painted-on door. They offer you a ‘Knowledge Base’ that looks, from a distance, like a library of wisdom. You approach it with hope, clicking through categories labeled ‘Technical Specifications’ and ‘Troubleshooting.’ But when you finally reach the door, you find it is merely a high-resolution image of a door.
“
The article you searched for, titled ‘Advanced Submersion Techniques,’ contains exactly 21 words: ‘For information regarding the use of our products in liquid environments, please contact our authorized support team via the ticketing system.’
This is the Great Deflection. It is a calculated business strategy disguised as ‘self-service.’ The modern corporate philosophy dictates that every successful self-service interaction is a victory because it means one less ticket a paid agent has to touch. If the company can make the process of finding an answer so miserable that the customer gives up, that is also counted as a success in certain quarterly reports. They have ‘reduced ticket volume.’ They have ‘optimized support overhead.’ In reality, they have simply exhausted the customer’s will to continue. They have offloaded the labor of the business onto the consumer, forcing us to act as our own investigators, our own data entry clerks, and our own tech support agents, all while paying for the privilege.
The Labyrinth of Deflection
I find myself staring at the resin-coated LED. I have spent 41 minutes trying to bypass a system that was built to prevent me from talking to a person. The irony is that the more a company talks about ‘customer-centricity,’ the further they seem to push the customer away. They build these elaborate labyrinths of FAQs and forums, hoping we will get lost in the hallways and die of thirst before we reach the ‘Contact Us’ button. It is a cynical view of the world. It assumes that the customer’s time has zero value, while the company’s time is a precious resource that must be guarded by a phalanx of login screens and broken links.
[The portal is not a tool; it is a moat.]
Eli R.-M. once told me that the most expensive part of any miniature is the light. Not because the LEDs are costly, but because the wiring requires a level of patience that most people do not possess. If you rush the wiring, you burn the house down. Corporate support portals are rushing the wiring. They are trying to automate human connection without providing any of the actual ‘connection’ part. They give us the wires but no electricity. They give us the portal but no answers. They have created a system where the most efficient outcome for the business is for the customer to stop asking questions.
Service Efficiency Metrics (Conceptual)
Passive Service vs. Active Bridge
We are living in an era of passive service. Passive service is the FAQ that hasn’t been updated since 2021. Passive service is the chatbot that can only understand three keywords and eventually redirects you to the home page. It is a static, decaying wall of information that requires the user to do 101% of the work. The shift we are currently witnessing-the one that actually offers a glimmer of hope for someone like me with resin on my fingers-is the move toward active, intelligent service.
It is here that the technology shifts from a shield to a bridge. When you integrate a system like
Aissist, you are essentially admitting that the wall of text in your FAQ isn’t enough. You are moving toward a model where the AI doesn’t exist to deflect the human, but to actually solve the problem in the moment, with the nuance that a static portal lacks.
I remember an argument I had about the 31st floor of a skyscraper project I worked on years ago. I insisted that the lobby needed a physical attendant, even after hours. The developers wanted a touchscreen. I won the argument, but the skyscraper ended up with a touchscreen anyway because ‘efficiency’ always wins in the boardroom. But the touchscreen failed because people didn’t have simple questions. They didn’t want to know where the elevator was; they wanted to know if the elevator was safe during a thunderstorm. The touchscreen couldn’t answer the ‘why’ or the ‘what if.’ It could only provide the ‘where.’ This is the failure of the modern portal. It provides the ‘where’ (here is an article) but never the ‘how’ or the ‘why’ (how do I fix my specific problem right now?).
The Psychological Toll of Deflection
There is a psychological toll to being deflected. Each time I am forced to create a new password or navigate a broken menu, my relationship with the brand dissolves a little more. I begin to view the company as an adversary.
I am no longer a loyal user of their resin; I am a victim of their ‘Support Experience.’ The dollhouse I am building is meant to be a place of refuge, a tiny world where everything is perfect. The digital world I am forced to inhabit to finish it is the opposite. It is a world of 404 errors and ‘Access Denied’ messages. It is a world where $121 worth of materials are held hostage by a 3-sentence FAQ that I cannot reach.
Demand: Resolution vs. Minimization
We must demand better than deflection. The goal of a support system should not be to minimize tickets, but to maximize resolution. If a customer is at your digital door at 2:01 AM, it is because they are in the middle of a process. They are creating, or fixing, or exploring. To meet them with a ‘Forgot Password’ link and a requirement for a special character is to tell them that their creative process is a nuisance to your bottom line. We have the technology to do better. We have the ability to create AI agents that actually understand the context of a query, that can look at the resin-covered LED through a camera and say, ‘Yes, Eli, that will hold, but you need to wait 11 minutes for the first layer to cure.’
The Reflection of Care
I think back to the shingle argument. I told my apprentice that the hand-sanding was about the ‘soul’ of the wood. I realize now that I was trying to describe ‘care.’ When you care about the person who will eventually look at that dollhouse, you don’t take shortcuts. You don’t give them a painted-on door. You give them a door that swings on brass hinges with a satisfying click. You give them a tiny world that respects their presence. Why is it so much to ask that the multi-billion dollar companies we interact with every day show us the same level of respect? Why is ‘care’ not a KPI in the support department?
If I were to redesign the self-service portal, the first thing I would do is set it on fire. I would replace the search bar with a conversation. I would replace the password requirement with a recognition of identity. I would replace the deflection metrics with a
‘Time to Joy’ metric.
Because every second I spend in your portal is a second I am not building something beautiful. And that is a theft of time that no amount of ‘optimized deflection’ can justify.
The Final Submersion
I finally gave in. I created the password. I used a special character-a section sign-that I had to copy and paste from a character map. I logged in. I navigated to the ‘Advanced Submersion’ article. It was exactly as I feared. One sentence. One single, lonely sentence that told me to call support during business hours. I sat there in the silence of my studio, the blue light of the monitor reflecting off the dark walnut finish on my hands. I looked at the resin. I looked at the LED. I decided to submerge it anyway. Sometimes, you have to ignore the portal and take the risk. Sometimes, the only way to move forward is to stop seeking help from people who have built a fortress to prevent you from finding it.
The LED is now underwater. The resin is hardening. It hasn’t shorted out yet. In the morning, I will probably have to apologize to my apprentice for being so dogmatic about the shingles. I was wrong about the manual labor being the only path to soul, but I was right about one thing: the quality of the work is a direct reflection of how much you respect the person on the other side. My dollhouses have soul because I don’t hide behind painted doors. I wish I could say the same for the companies that sell me the parts to build them. Until then, I will keep building my 1:12 scale worlds, where the doors always open and the support is as simple as a steady hand and a sharp eye, no 12-character password required.