The strength of a monopoly can be guessed at by calling customer support
The US govt has some of the worst support I&#x27;ve ever witnessed in my entire life.<p>1. I was audit by the IRS this year and so far I&#x27;ve logged about 6 hours of waiting on hold over ~15 individual call attempts of which I was never able to speak to someone beyond their initial call center.<p>Then I sent in the requested receipts as per their instructions. They told me the receipts -they- requested weren&#x27;t proof enough, so I had to provide additional paperwork.<p>This has been an ongoing process for around 8 months and it&#x27;s still not revolved. They haven&#x27;t contacted me in about a month since the date they told me my case would be reviewed, so who knows what happened. Given they haven&#x27;t asked me anything else or sent me a notice or bill warning, I&#x27;m guessing they finally figured out I wasn&#x27;t lying all along.<p>2. I also once got denied a new social security card because I had an expired driver&#x27;s license and no credit card. I brought a ton of documentation as per their website and had enough proof of ID. The lady at the desk told me &quot;I&#x27;m sorry, I can&#x27;t issue your request&quot; so I showed her their own website with the proper forms of ID and she just repeated the same phrase. I left the place and mailed everything in along with a letter and my card was renewed but it took over 3 weeks.<p>3. After waiting 2.5 hours on hold for health insurance I finally got a person who told me they can&#x27;t handle my request (even though this was the number listed on their website), so they forwarded me to a new number, and then I waited on hold for another hour, and then as soon as I got connected, they asked for a million pieces of information from me and hung up before processing anything. It was like 4 hours of a total waste of time and then I got penalized thousands of dollars in the end for not having insurance.<p>The worst part about this monopoly is we pay a ton of money towards taxes but get treated so poorly.<p>I once witnessed some little girl twist her ankle on a severely broken side walk. It took the town 3 years before they finally decided to fix it. It also took them 3 months to complete the job which was to redo about 20 feet of side walk.