Something You Should Know - Secrets to Getting Great Customer Service & The Curious Story of Remote Controls

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Starting point is 00:01:30 with code SYSK. Today on something you should know, why do certain smells bring back such vivid memories? Then getting good customer service, the right and the wrong ways to complain. If you say I'm contacting a lawyer, that gets rooted to the legal department, and that's where complaints go to die.

Starting point is 00:01:55 Here's another favorite of mine is I'm never staying in your hotel or flying on your airline again. What incentive do they have to fix the price? problem if you're leaving. Also, the real reason your fingers get wrinkly in the bathtub. And the interesting and curious story of your TV's remote control. So you might be wondering why does your television remote have so many buttons you never use? Those are actually called vestigial buttons and remote control designers know you're not using them.

Starting point is 00:02:31 All this today on something you should know. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call Someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years.

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Starting point is 00:04:19 Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. So you can look at an old photograph and remember the past, but catch a whiff of your grandmother's perfume or your childhood home or freshly cut grass and suddenly you can feel as if you've actually been transported. There's a reason that smell can have such an extraordinary effect on memory. Information from most of our senses takes a more roundabout root through the brain, but smell has an unusually direct connection to areas of the brain involved in emotion and memory. And studies have found that memories triggered by odors tend to be particularly emotional

Starting point is 00:04:59 and often come from earlier periods in our lives. There's even a useful way to take advantage of this. If you're trying to remember something from long ago, don't just think harder. Try recreating some of the sensory cues that surround it, a particular perfume, a song, a location, or other familiar smell. Sometimes the memory isn't gone. You just haven't found the right key to unlock it.

Starting point is 00:05:26 And that is something you should know. Everybody has at least one good customer service nightmare story. You have a problem, you call the company, and before long you're trapped in a maze of automated menus, chatbots, hold music, and representatives who either can't or won't fix the problem. And sometimes just figuring out how to reach an actual human being feels like an accomplishment. But now here's the good news. When something goes wrong, there are ways.

Starting point is 00:05:59 to dramatically improve your chances of getting the company to actually help you. There are certain things to say, people to contact, and strategies that work surprisingly well. And there are also some common things customers do that make the situation worse. Christopher Elliott has spent years helping consumers solve exactly these kinds of problems. He is a consumer advocate and nationally syndicated columnist who writes the newsletter, Elliot Confidential.

Starting point is 00:06:29 and he recently launched a podcast. He knows how companies handle complaints, where the pressure points are, and what you can do to get better customer service when things go wrong. Hi, Christopher, welcome to something you should know. Thanks for having me. So if you had to take a snapshot of the world of customer service and grade it, where are we? Is it good?

Starting point is 00:06:52 Is it better? Is it getting worse? What do you think of the world of customer service? Well, I should preface my answer. by saying that one of my specialties is travel. So I deal with a lot of travel complaints, but I also deal with a fair number of other consumer complaints, things like cars that you bought at a dealership that ended up breaking down

Starting point is 00:07:13 or appliances that stopped working. And overall, right now we're in a phase of automation, which is to say when you call a company, you get put through to a chatbot, and you have to deal with phone trees, chatbot. bots, AI, that sort of thing. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But we're in the early stages of that now.

Starting point is 00:07:37 I don't know how it's going to end. Overall, I'm kind of mildly optimistic that automation might improve things, but the jury is still out. So often when people talk about customer service, what they're really meaning is complaining. They have a complaint. They're seldom are they calling to say how wonderful everything is. they're calling because there's a problem. And I would imagine, I mean, in my sense is that how you approach it, who you come off as, if you're a jerk or if you're a reasonable human being, that has a lot to do with how this conversation's going to go. You're absolutely correct. The approach is really important. It's probably more important now than ever. Most people of, well, I would say of a certain generation, but certainly it applies to,

Starting point is 00:08:28 all readers that I've encountered, they think that if you just pick the phone up and call the company that you're going to be able to fix a problem. And increasingly, that is not the case anymore. You have to have a paper trail and you have to be factual, not emotional when you're dealing with a company. And you can't come off as being complaining or whiny because that can actually affect the outcome of your complaint. And I'll just give you an example if you want. Yeah, please. If you say I'm contacting a lawyer, which a lot of people will do out of frustration, even though they don't even have access to a lawyer, that gets rooted to the legal department,

Starting point is 00:09:07 and that's where complaints go to die. So those kind of threats don't do much. I mean, unless you actually are prepared to go to court. But here's the thing, though, if you are going to go to court, you don't make a threat to a customer service representative. you send a legal letter and it goes to the legal department and that's where it gets dealt with. Here's another favorite of mine is I'm never staying in your hotel or flying on your airline again. What incentive do they have to fix the problem if you're leaving? So those are some of the things that will kill your complaint immediately.

Starting point is 00:09:47 What about threatening, you know, it's not even a threat, but what about going to the top rather than deal with a customer service rep. Let me speak to your supervisor and let me speak to his supervisor or her supervisor until somebody gives me the answer I want. About two decades ago, I tried helping a reader who asked almost the identical question, is there someone I can appeal this to? And I did a lot of research and finally found an email address. Back then, people still, their email addresses were still relatively hidden and helped someone with their complaint because they ended up escalating it too. It wasn't the CEO, it was like the chief customer service officer. And out of that came this idea for our directory of executive contacts.

Starting point is 00:10:45 And it started with just travel, but it expanded quickly beyond that. And now we have nearly 3,000 companies at elliot.org. That's E-L-L-L-I-O-T-T-O-R-G. If you go there, you can just find that directory. And to answer your question in a very roundabout way, yes, it does help. You can escalate. When someone tells you on the phone, there's no one to appeal to, they are lying. There's always someone to appeal to.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And these executives try really hard to keep their email addresses and phone number as a secret. You would be shocked at the number of lawyer letters that I get demanding that I take down this information. But it is protected under the First Amendment. And there is a correct way of using this, too. You don't start with the CEO. You start with creating a really good paper trail. And then if that doesn't work, you appeal to a manager, not immediately to the CEO. because once you go to the CEO's office, that's like spending, that's your last resort.

Starting point is 00:11:46 That's the nuclear option. You want to go through all the channels. But that does work. I've seen it work. And so most complaints probably will never get that far. When people have a problem, usually it seems it can be worked out most of the time at a fairly low level. But does it really make any difference whether you do it by phone? or by email or they might have a chat thing on their website or as long as you're talking to somebody,

Starting point is 00:12:16 at least the conversation continues. It depends on the company that you're working with, but you want to stay off the phone if possible. And the reason for that is there's no record of a phone conversation unless you're recording it. In some states, that's not legal. The other thing is chats. Okay, so chats do work better, but some companies disable the safe chat. feature because they don't want you to see the entire chat. So you end up having to take screenshots because once you exit the screen,

Starting point is 00:12:48 that chat is completely erased. The best option really is either an email because you can keep that thread or even sending a paper letter or maybe a UPS or FedEx or something like that so that there's a record of it. But you want to create a paper trail. the best, the one that I always recommend is email. It's just, it works the best. And if you have something in writing, it's really difficult to refute that. Yeah, right. When people complain, when they get upset about something, something doesn't work or, you know, whatever. They often, it seems, just want to complain, but they don't ask for anything. They just want to bitch. And my guess is that if you don't ask for something, how can they give it to you?

Starting point is 00:13:40 Yeah, you're right. I think people get really frustrated and they lose their sense of perspective and they want to make someone else feel bad because they feel bad. It's just a very normal human emotion. The thing that I recommend when dealing with the consumer complaint

Starting point is 00:14:00 is to take a deep breath, count to 10, and if you're going to send an email, let someone who, is not involved in the dispute, have a look at it first, just to make sure that you've taken out all the all- uppercase, you know, the yelling and the salty language and the threats, and only then and only then send it. Because you really don't want, you know, you talk about failure of consumer compliance. One of the things that really leads to failure is if you, if you

Starting point is 00:14:35 just this morning I was just reading a consumer complaint where someone had said, I hate you, I hope you get cancer and die. I'm not making this up. I guarantee you that complaint is not going to go anywhere. It's going to, people are just going to throw it directly into the digital trash can. Right. And probably have a good laugh because, I mean, whoever wrote it is completely, unhinged and and it's hard to take people seriously when they rant and scream and yell. Absolutely. Well, and you really have to be very precise in when you send a written complaint. You can't just say, hey, this went bad and I demand compensation. You have to say, here is the

Starting point is 00:15:24 rule, your own policy that you violated. And here is how you can make it right. And it has to be a reasonable request. It can't be, you know, the classic one is my, you didn't have the entree I wanted and I demand a seat in first class anywhere you fly. Well, that's not really a reasonable request. So you have to like be a little bit more reasonable with what you're asking and think about how is, what kind of compensation could they offer me? Maybe it's going to be some points or even just autopology sometimes is enough.

Starting point is 00:16:06 Well, I have several more questions I want to ask you about this whole world of customer service. And we'll do that right after this. We're talking about getting better customer service from the companies we do business with. My guest is consumer advocate Christopher Elliott. He is a syndicated columnist. And he has a newsletter called Elliott Confidential and a new podcast too. So Christopher, we were talking about like people ranting, not asking for anything, just saying how upset they are. But I also think people are sometimes reluctant to ask because they don't know what to ask and maybe they wouldn't be asking enough.

Starting point is 00:16:47 And maybe they should ask for more. That's a fair point. You really have to do your research. And this is where, you know, just a little basic searching or consulting with Gemini or Claude can help. What's the most reasonable compensation? We have forums, too, where people are happy to answer that question. If you go to Elliottconfidential.com forward slash community, we have a forum there, and we have a lot of advocates, volunteers who would just want to help answer. So we would be happy to tell you if you're out of line.

Starting point is 00:17:19 But, yeah, you don't want to say nothing because then they're going to give you nothing. What are some of the other ways that people trip themselves up because of what they say or who they talk to or anything that you've come across that people are really sabotaging their own efforts because they're too emotional or whatever? Yeah, I mean, we've already talked about the emotions that I have so many great anecdotes. I won't bore you with them. But I think one of the things that people do that they shouldn't do, is wait. You know, they have a bad experiences and they say, well, when I get home, I'm going to write to the CEO. And the best thing to do is actually to ask while you're right there on the scene, because a lot of times employees are empowered to help you. So just as an example, if you're,

Starting point is 00:18:16 you know, if you're staying at a hotel and something goes wrong, let's say the ice machine broke down and you really like ice. You know, you can talk to someone at the front desk and say, hey, you know, this is an amenity that I want. Usually it's like the pool or something like that. And, you know, the pool's out of order or the gym is locked. And they're often authorized to do things like offer you a voucher for maybe a drink or a meal. And that is often enough to make the problem go away. What do you do when you're told, I'm sorry, sir, that's our policy.

Starting point is 00:18:54 It seems like a brick wall, like, well, there's nothing I can do. That's our policy. That's happened to me. And it's happened to a lot of my readers. I think the first thing that you want to do is to say, hey, could I take a look at that policy? You know, don't be mean about it, but just say, okay, I'd like to know what the policy actually is. And sometimes when you read the policy and you reflect on it, you realize that that's not actually the policy. That's their interpretation of the policy. And if you can do that, sometimes their whole attitude will change. They'll be like, well, you know, let me see if I can help you out here or something like that. Because they don't want to get dragged into a big discussion about the policy. And, you know, sometimes the policy is wrong too. This has happened to us a lot in our advocacy is that policy will conflict with state or federal law. And when that happens, having the law on your side really does make a big difference.

Starting point is 00:19:54 And when you appeal your case to someone at a higher level and say, here's your policy and here it is in writing, and here's what state law says about this, can you help me? And usually they are very helpful at that point. Not to put you on the spot, but can you give me an example of that? This happens most often when we have an airline that has a cancellation. And so the ticket agents and gate agents are incentivized to give away a voucher. for a future flight when you, you know, when a flight is not operating. There is a federal law that just went into effect that says that there has to be an automatic refund offered in cash.

Starting point is 00:20:39 So they have to pay you actual money if they cancel a flight. And what we've noticed is that some airlines have still decided that they're going to follow their own policies, which is to, you know, offer a flight voucher when there's a cancellation. Do you get a sense, as I think many people do, that for many companies, you know, it's like, it's like that recording. Your call is very important to us. So we're going to make you wait for 45 minutes to answer it. The companies put roadblocks in deliberately, or it just seems that way? It seems that way because it is that way. There actually have been capable of where companies have been caught trying to extend wait times or intentionally

Starting point is 00:21:28 disconnect their customers. If you're still calling a company for something, you're not doing it correctly. Companies don't want to hear from you and they do want you to engage their AI chatbots or to email them but they don't want to hear from you. So they're going to make it as difficult as possible to get someone on the phone. It's very unfortunate. It's unfortunately going to get worse I think before it gets better. There are companies, though, that are renowned for good customer service, you know, Costco, Nordstrom, I mean, there are companies that make it a priority, and when they do, it seems to be rewarded with loyalty that other stores don't get. I have a list that I keep of companies that we get lots of complaints about and ones that always

Starting point is 00:22:18 resolve the problems often before they're asked. It's called the Red List and the Green List. You can find on our site, elliot.org. And yeah, there's a couple of companies that are real standouts. You mentioned Costco, that's one, and where they just always default to the right thing. If something goes wrong, they're going to try to make it right, and they're going to really bend over backward to do it. And I think everyone kind of knows what those companies are. You know, there's Costco.

Starting point is 00:22:45 For example, in hotels, it's Carlton and Airlines, there's Southwest. and they are always going to, if you have a problem, they're going to try to fix it before it gets to be a big problem, or even before you have a chance to ask, which is great. And you would think they wouldn't do that unless they saw a payoff to doing that? You would think so. I think that it has a lot to do with corporate culture. They do it because it's the right thing to do. And that ends up helping them on the bottom line. line. Well, I would think that if you want to get good customer service, particularly if you have a complaint and you're calling a company, it just seems to make all the sense in the world to be

Starting point is 00:23:32 polite because those people get yelled at and screamed that. And when you call and you're nice and friendly, it seems like that's going to get a better result than screaming and yelling. Well, that's why people don't last very long in those jobs and why they're trying to outsource them to chatbots because you can't offend a chatbot. But a human, yeah, you go home and you cry into your pillow when you have a bad day. And, you know, and people don't deserve that. I talked to someone who works in customer service this morning and she said, yeah, things are really bad. People don't have a problem making threats and yelling at me. And it's horrible. So being polite makes you stand out, makes them want to help you.

Starting point is 00:24:19 Yeah, I think that's probably the best advice of all is, you know, be civil and watch what happens and be a jerk and watch what happens. Yes. Where we are right now as a country and as consumers is that we really don't seem to have any problems screaming and yelling and ranting and raving at customer service agents. And I think that that's one. one of the big reasons for it's a, it's like a vicious cycle where someone, a company will tighten the policy and then consumers will get upset and start yelling and then it gets worse and worse and

Starting point is 00:24:57 worse. And it has to change at some point and I hope it does. Well, as somebody who deals with customer service and consumer complaints all the time, I appreciate the insight. And if you'd like to get more information about Christopher's newsletter, Elliott Confidential, and all the other work that he does, as well as his podcast, there's a link to Elliot.org in the show notes. It's elliot.org, and there's two L's and there's two T's in Elliott. Christopher, thanks for being here.

Starting point is 00:25:27 Mike, it was a pleasure, and please let me know if there's anything else I can do. It's hard to imagine getting through a day without using some kind of remote control. You unlock your car with one. You change the TV with one. You may use one to open your garage door, adjust the temperature, or turn off the lights. And now, with Alexa and Siri, you don't even need buttons. Your voice has become the remote control. Yet for something we use constantly, remote controls are surprisingly strange. Why are they often loaded with buttons nobody uses or even knows what they do?

Starting point is 00:26:09 Why are some so complicated you practically need instructions just to watch television? and why do some people call the TV remote a clicker when it doesn't click? The story of the remote control is a curious one, and here to tell it is Caitlin Benson Allot. She is a professor of English and film and media studies at Georgetown University and author of a book called Remote Control. Hi, Caitlin, welcome to something you should know.

Starting point is 00:26:39 Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Sure. Well, it seems the remote control is one of those inevitable. inventions. It had to have been invented. But is the story traceable back to a true beginning? As for the first remote control device, that was actually 1898 by the famous inventor Nikola Tesla. He was at a world's fair, and he showed his audience a little boat that was attached to a wire and how he could move the boat around a pond without actually touching the boat itself. And that might sound pretty boring, but it was very interesting to the U.S. military, which was in the

Starting point is 00:27:28 midst of the Spanish-American War. And so the idea of being able to send boats or tanks or planes out into battle without actually having to put any soldiers on them, that was really interesting. I'll bet. And do you have a sense of like what are some of the first things that were remote controlled besides that? Sure. So within the houses of most Americans, maybe we should actually say most wealthy Americans, the first way remote controls entered was attached to radio receivers. Back in the 1920s, radio receivers were the size of a kitchen cabinet. They were furniture proper. And this radio manufacturer named Colster got the idea that perhaps their wealthier clients

Starting point is 00:28:33 didn't want to have to get up out of their easy chairs or walk away from their tea tables to change the station of their radios. So in 1929, they introduced this box. It's about the size of a box of chocolates today on the end of a very thick 20-foot cable. And that was the first remote control. And I imagine the big innovation that made remote controls much cooler, was the ability to transmit through the air because if it's on a wire, it's still plugged in.

Starting point is 00:29:16 And I remember my grandfather used to have a TV when I was a kid. He said he had a, it had a remote control, but there was a wire running across the living room from the TV to the remote control that I'm sure people would trip on because, you know, that's the only way you could get the signal from here to there. Yeah. I bet your grandfather had a zenith lazybones, which was one of the first television remotes, the first really popular television remote. And it was wired. But, you know, to his credit, he was an early adopter. And that thing would have cost about $300 in today's money on top of the TV set. You're right, though, that wireless remote control was a huge,

Starting point is 00:30:06 huge step forward. Although manufacturers didn't exactly know how to make it work at first, they tried full spectrum light, what was basically like a flashlight that you would aim at different corners of your TV set. They tried ultrasonic tuning, these tiny little tuning forks inside of a plastic remote control box that humans couldn't hear, but actually dogs could, that's where the term the clicker comes from. And it wasn't until the early 1980s that we got the kind of wireless remote controls that we know today, which work on infrared LEDs. I remember another TV in our house many years ago that had a, wireless remote control, but it made a very distinctive click.

Starting point is 00:31:03 It was, and I assume that the noise itself was part of how it worked. It had to, the TV had to hear that click, right? Right. Well, sort of. So the TV had to hear this ultrasonic frequency that is actually beyond the range of human hearing. That's why I said dogs can hear it, but people can't. I guess I should have said television and dogs can hear it, but people can't. What we heard was a tiny little hammer inside the box hitting the tuning fork that would release this ultrasonic frequency.

Starting point is 00:31:46 But that was a real confusion. People thought that little click noise was what was changing their television channel. And that's why for a certain generation of Americans, remote controls have always been and will always be the clicker. Yeah, people still use that phrase, even though they're silent, the people still say, Have you seen the clicker? I can't find the clicker. It's weird how that is stuck when there's no clicking. It's really interesting, right? Now we have the sort of silent, soft buttons of post-tivo remotes, those universal remotes that came with your cable box or maybe your television set.

Starting point is 00:32:31 Or we just have the track pads on our Apple remotes. Although I've noticed that the four little buttons on my Apple remote actually do make a tiny clicking noise when I use them. But maybe that's just for you so you know you pushed it rather than for the receiving device. Exactly, just like back in the 1950s. And as I recall, that clicking remote that I remember, it only did one thing. It only rotated the channels in order. You couldn't do the volume. You couldn't go backwards.

Starting point is 00:33:08 You couldn't even turn the TV on with it. All it did was rotate through the channels two through 13. Correct. So it took a long time for inventors to find a way to get multiple functions into a remote control. And at first, they assumed that changing the channel would be the thing that people did the most and didn't want to get up for. But what they weren't counting on is that back in the 1950s, most people only got one or two television stations. So changing the channel was less important than, say, muting the television when the advertisements came on. Muting TVs was actually the thing that got people excited about remote control in mid-century. And I just want to give a shout out to Howard Manashevitz,

Starting point is 00:34:12 as in Manishovets wine, same family. who invented a homemade remote control called the Blab Off in 1950, that eventually got Zenith and RCA and the rest of the big manufacturers to be like, okay, okay, we get it. You hate advertisements. You want to be able to change the volume and turn off the television from the couch. I imagine, I think it was in the 70s, when we had the ability to record television shows off the TV with a VCR,

Starting point is 00:34:50 having the ability to record a show and then rewind it, fast forward it, and perhaps most importantly, pause it while you're watching it, that had to be a big moment in the world of remote controls. That's really true. When VCRs came out in the mid-1970s, the first function a remote control had was a pause button. In fact, Sony's first VCR remote only had a pause button. Because having that control over time, stopping the flow of the show so you could go to the

Starting point is 00:35:29 bathroom or answer the phone, that was mind-blowing to people. So at some point, after remote controls got fairly sophisticated, came the universal remote, which had 400 buttons on it that nobody could ever figure out how to use. Or certainly I never did. I mean, they were so complicated that it was just easier to use the remote that came with the TV and have three or four remotes on the table than try to figure out this thing. Totally. You know, Steve Wozniak of Apple was actually the first person to offer a universal remote control, which you could program. to do any function you wanted to.

Starting point is 00:36:15 But it really wasn't popular because it was so complicated. And people just wanted that simple pause, change channels, fast forward, mute functionality. So you might be wondering then why does your cable remote or your television remote have so many buttons you never use, no one ever even explained to you, those are actually called vestigial buttons, and remote control designers know you're not using them. They know that the look of all of those buttons on the remote makes you feel powerful, makes you feel like you could do whatever you wanted with your technology and your media. But in fact, Studies have shown, and the engineers know this too, that the more buttons there are on a remote

Starting point is 00:37:12 control, the fewer people use. And so look at the Apple remote for the Apple TV, is, what, four buttons? And is it clean and easy to use? And it doesn't buy into that idea that you need 400 buttons on your remote. And this is one of Apple's real strengths as a company design, and especially simplified user-focused design. But the only reason those Apple remotes work for us is because a lot of the functionality that we need has been transferred over onto that horrible grid of apps that comes up every time you open your Apple TV. Right. So you're just using arrows to do things on the screen, rather than actually do them on the remote. Bingo.

Starting point is 00:38:09 On a television remote, you might have pressed one three for Channel 13 to watch Murder She Wrote or whatever you were looking for. But now you're going to use those little directional buttons to work through a different app after a different app looking for who's got Murder She Wrote and how you can play it most easily. So I'm wondering why of the infinite number of shows you could have picked, you picked Murder She Wrote. Murder She Wrote is really popular among film and television professors, along with Golden Girls and Colombo. I'm not sure what it is, but we just love those shows.

Starting point is 00:38:54 Okay, that's fair. So now here's the next problem. So we simplify the remote. So you've got like an Apple TV remote that's. It's just got a couple of buttons, and it's very thin and small, whereas the old remotes were big and had lots of buttons. But now the Apple remote is so small and thin, it's easy to lose it in the couch cushions or whatever, where it wasn't so easy to lose the old remotes. That's a really good point. And mine also goes missing all of the time.

Starting point is 00:39:25 It slides between couch cushions. it like disappears under books and magazines. And there is a precedent for that, actually. In the 1980s, there was this fad for secondary remotes, things you'd go buy in the store that were not the remote your television came with, that were simpler and easier to use and maybe more fun than the remote control you actually got. And one of the most popular versions of those was about the size and almost as thin as a credit card.

Starting point is 00:40:05 And even though it looked cool, people hated it because it got lost so easily. Ironically, Apple has recreated that exact problem. And it's really interesting to wonder why they don't want to change that problem. Well, because probably when you fix one problem, you probably create another one. So, you know, you've got to decide which problem you can live with. Exactly. And that's actually a really profound pattern in the history of remote controls. Remotes often produce the problems that they purport to solve.

Starting point is 00:40:48 So, for example, we've talked about muting commercials and changing volume levels. up and down. Well, one of the things remote controls have done for us is allow us to sit further away from our television sets. I mean, think about it. You wouldn't want to be across an open floor plan living room from your TV if you had to get up every time you wanted to change apps on the Apple TV. So we turn our televisions up louder because they're further away. And then we need remote controls to lower the volume when it starts to shake the walls or someone actually, God forbid, wants to talk to us in real life. And so now things can be done remotely.

Starting point is 00:41:44 Like, you know, you can fly a plane. You see it, you know, the military can fly a drone. remotely, is that an evolution of the same technology or is that an altogether different technology? That's an altogether different technology. But the principle, if we go back to thinking about Nikola Tesla and that world's fair, the principle is the same. The first remote controls were designed for use in war. So in a way, military drones are actually a more traditional version of remote control than the little boxes that are cluttering up your living room.

Starting point is 00:42:27 And so for remote controls to work and to be able to program your TV with this remote control, there must have been a convention where everybody sat down and said, these are the standards for remote controls so that we can all work together? If only. So basically all of these electronics,

Starting point is 00:42:48 manufacturers want you to use their product. And so it's in their best interest if their remote controls don't work with their competitors' devices. So, for example, my Apple TV remote won't work on my Blu-ray player, right? And the Blu-ray player remote won't work on my television set. television set. There used to be this trend in the late 80s, early 90s of companies like Mitsubishi and Sony selling these universal remotes that they promised would control your TV, your VCR, your stereo system, the whole multimedia setup in your house, provided that you bought all of your

Starting point is 00:43:45 components from Mitsubishi or from Sony. Turns out people don't actually work that way, though. We tend to buy what's cheapest or looks coolest or fits on our wall. So that vision of total control never really panned out. I know you wrote the book a few years ago, but is there anything new in the world of remote controls or on the horizon that's coming? So when I wrote the book, I got a lot of pushback because Google Home and Alexa were really new devices. And people were like, oh, you wrote a book about remote controls.

Starting point is 00:44:29 Remote controls are over. It's all about voice control now. And I said, well, actually, if you think about it, you may be talking to Alexa, but you're telling her to do stuff on a different. device, right? You're telling your Google Home to check the weather using your computer. It's not happening in the Google Home. And so really those are remote controls. And you can see that in the Apple remote too, right? The voice recognition, the microphone, is in the remote control. And so I remember once at a book reading, someone asked me, well, you know, why? Why would they want to

Starting point is 00:45:15 to put the microphones in remote controls instead of in the unit itself. And I asked, well, how many times have you lost your remote control in the last month? Did you ever get so far that you thought you were going to have to buy a new one? So I don't think remote controls are going anywhere. They may produce the problems that they purport to solve. but they're doing a lot of favors, not just for us, but for the manufacturers as well. Well, you think about how many times you use a remote control, and yet nobody ever really thinks about it or knows much about how they came to be.

Starting point is 00:46:00 So I really appreciate you coming on to explain it. Caitlin Benson Allett has been my guest. She's a professor of English and film and media studies at Georgetown, and she's author of the book, Remote Control. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Caitlin, thanks, this was interesting. All right, super. Thank you so much. You've probably been told that the reason your fingers get wrinkly in a bathtub is because the skin absorbs the water and swells.

Starting point is 00:46:32 But that's not really what's happening. Those wrinkles are actually created by your nervous system. When your hands or feet stay wet for a while, blood vessels beneath the skin constrict, pulling the skin downward, and creating those familiar grooves. In fact, doctors discovered decades ago that fingers with certain types of nerve damage don't normally wrinkle in water. So why would your body deliberately give you pruny fingers?

Starting point is 00:47:01 Well, one fascinating explanation is that wrinkles work a little like the tread on a tire, channeling water away and giving you a better grip on wet objects. Experiments have actually found that people with wrinkled fingertips can handle wet objects faster than people with smooth fingertips. So those ugly bathtub fingers may actually be a feature, not a flaw. And that is something you should know. You know, as much as we like to promote this podcast

Starting point is 00:47:30 and find new ways to get listeners, nobody can get a new listener as well as you can. As a regular listener to this podcast, people will listen to you and give this a try, and we would appreciate it. So please share the podcast with someone you know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Something You Should Know - Secrets to Getting Great Customer Service & The Curious Story of Remote Controls

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