The Twilight Store (S3:E10)
It was early afternoon when the cell phone rang. An international number that I did not know was calling me. I thought it could be a scam, did not answer and declined the call.
A text message was sent to me from my mobile phone carrier notifying me of the missed call. Since I was on my PC, I opened my app, the one for which I have to prove that it allows me to see the phone’s text messages, copied the phone number, and did a search to see if I could find anything relative to the caller. I also sent a text message to the caller, again using my app for which I have to prove that it has this functionality, asking who it was. I didn’t get any response because as I found out later it’s a landline number.
At first the search didn’t give me any results but by changing some parameters I was able to find that the phone number is a landline from some Google office. I thought “F@ck, I should have answered, they were calling me for the developer account verification. But, wait a minute, we hadn’t planned this verification for now, maybe they wanted to verify something related to payments?”.
While I was thinking these things, I got an email from the policy team: it said they called me but couldn’t find me — I believe it, I declined the call — and they were calling me to talk about the SMS/Call Log Permission Violations topic. This e-mail was not like the previous ones, and I have some experience about it, it didn’t look prefabricated, I don’t know how to explain it, it looked like it was written by a human trying to communicate with another human, it was a peer-to-peer communication.
I know that many developers would pay top dollar to get the policy team’s phone number, but they won’t get it from me. They won’t get it now, they won’t get it when my app will be removed for some random reason, they won’t get it when my developer account will be suspended for association with an unknown account, and they won’t even get it when a gemini powered robot rings my door to physically terminate my developer account. It is a matter of respect.
You’ll ask, “So far you have written three seasons and eighteen episodes, where had the respect gone before?”.
Since you ask, I will tell you that before in the communication there was not much to respect, in some cases it was even surreal and on top of that it looked like it was done with a lazy bot hurrying to close the communication without providing useful answers and going to … well, I don’t know what bots do in their spare time, whatever they do.
I will also tell you that I will have no hesitation to write another hundred seasons and a thousand episodes if it’s needed, I will come back to that in another post where I will tell you my opinion on what we, not “me”, “we”, developers should do.
I immediately started responding, maybe this is the opportunity I was looking for so I could get the missing information. As I was writing the reply, which I wanted to be clear and explain everything I thought was important, I got a second call from the same number. This time I answered. I spoke with a person regarding the situation, received and provided explanations, and we agreed that I would send an email to explain in detail how the app works so that they could better assess the situation and communicate with me again to give me more information.
I declined a phone call, received an e-mail, a second phone call and a promise that they would continue to investigate my case to provide me with more details. Am I the chosen one?
Don’t miss S3:E11 (season finale)
