Semi-related rant...
<rant style="angry, tired">
Meanwhile, Google called at 5:30am today after I had finally gotten to sleep after an unusually restless night.
My wife still consults on Google Ads for a few small clients. She used to have an account with a couple hundred thousand a month in spend, and even there the Google reps are usually really bad, but sometimes you would get someone with actual knowledge.
Now she's just doing some small accounts and you get the bottom of the barrel reps in a rotating circle who move up the food chain as soon as they are able. They seem to be under pressure to call every account monthly with utterly useless advice (usually trying to get you to turn on some new automation and, of course, to increase your spend).
She keeps telling them not to call, but they keep calling and they do so at ALL hours - 5:30am, 11:00pm. If she succeeds in getting them to stop, it starts back up as soon as the account gets passed to the next person.
Google knows what I had for breakfast, my secret desires and the chemical composition of my farts, but they do not seem to know that I live in California and do not want calls at 5:30am or 11:30pm.
It is so bad that when the phone rang at 5:30am today. I knew it was Google. I'm not sure exactly why, but it is a measure of how much you are annoying people if you call at 5:30am and their first guess is that it is you.
Me: "Is this fuc... Is this Google?" I bit my tongue on the 10% chance it was not Google. It was.
Once again, and the nth time, I told him, "Never call this number again. Never."
Usually lasts about a month until they roll one of the accounts over the newest junior employee to cut their teeth on customers that don't matter.
It used to be that we constantly got calls from scammers representing themselves as Google and offering ad management services. Those have dropped to zero. I haven't gotten one in a few years. But actual annoying spam calls from Google are constant.
At least the scammers of old had the decency to call when I was awake. Not so with actual Google. I hate them.
And no, this isn't because the client address is in another time zone. These are all California businesses with no presence elsewhere.
</rant>
[BTW, because of some family medical stuff going on in another time zone, I don't want to just ignore calls at 5:30am, because some of them are from good, busy people trying to help out as soon as they can, and I don't want to miss those]
