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Getting Customer Support on Google Ads is Like Visiting Hell

I sometimes get the impression that people believe Google is some kind of magnificent, competent enterprise.

Sure, they make billions of dollars every minute, but how much of that goes into making a genuinely good product for its users and how much is just the result of being literally the only product we can use?

How much of all that money is being spent offering satisfying customer support that, well, provides support when needed?

Honestly, contacting Google Support in 2025 is like living in a Kurt Vonnegut novel or a story by Franz Kafka.

It’s surreal, hard to communicate ideas clearly, and no one is helpful.

It’s like visiting hell.

Here’s how my morning went with Google and the steps I took to troubleshoot something which realistically could have been solved in 10 seconds if only it was easy to reach someone (or even prevented if they had properly sent out an email in the first place).

8:30AM. I log on to check our Google Ads account. What with Easter and all sorts of things going on, it had been about a week since I last checked things.

I wasn’t really worried initially. Apart from the odd optimizations, this account pretty much ran like clockwork.

However, the moment I log on I see the flat line of despair for the past week’s data.

Usually that means a credit card issue, but in this case, there was a little message at the top of the screen telling me that the account was deactivated.

Not paused, deactivated.

That’s weird. I assumed until then that the only way to do that was through manual action.

And apparently it happened right before the Easter weekend (lovely timing).

I checked my inbox to see if Google had notified me and I just missed it, but nope – the last message was just something about billing and not related to this.

Figuring I could just reactivate the account as it’s been far less than 30 or 90 days or whatever the time period is where they allow accounts to be recovered, I went into my settings and then preferences, only to find the following message:

This account is deactivated. Please contact support to reactivate it. — Google Ads

Okay, still strange, but not the end of the world.

I click the help button and check the first recommended topic from the ask the experts portal.The very first question is about this issue, and the answer is “immediately speak with support.”

So I click back, select other, and click my way to the options of contacting someone at Google.

It highlights and recommends that I opt for “Chat” because there was only a 1 minute wait.

So I fill in the form for chat, only to get hit with a message that “Sorry, all our agents are unavailable. Try again later.”

I try that a few times over the next couple of minutes. No change.

It still says its the recommended route with a 1 min wait time.

I turn back and try the phone option. It gives me a number.

For the briefest of moments, I’m sent back in time to the good old days of Google when you could call a number and a person would answer. And they would help you.

I dial the number and reach an automated voice system to walk me through.

It asks for my account number which I have to repeat three times.

Then it asks for the issue. I tell it, reading the issue wording from Google Ads verbatim.

It doesn’t understand. Instead it asks which sort of campaign am I having an issue with.

I repeat that it’s not a campaign. It’s an account issue.

I go through this two more times before the bot says it will transfer me to a person.

Finally, I think, as I hear the transfer complete. But instead of a person saying hello, it sounds like a cafeteria. A dozen voices buzzing, and what sounds conspicuously like pots dropping into the sink.

I ask if anyone is there and hear a distant mouse voice that sounds like there could be.

After explaining that I can’t hear anything, they try various things, each time becoming maybe 10% clearer, but still 50% quieter than the background noise.

I ask if they have a headset. Their answer:

No. — Google Rep.

Can they duck into a closet or the washroom?

They do.

I can sort of hear them now, with all the background noise now more distant. Like the way noises sound when you’re in the bathtub listening to the rest of the house.

I remind myself that I’m speaking with an official customer service agent at one of the world’s wealthiest corporations.

And yet here I am, shouting into my phone, while the volume is cranked up, trying to have a conversation with a woman in a bathroom on the far side of the planet who only has her laptop mic and speakers, just to find out how I can spend more money with Google again.

I spell out my issue and she says she will check. Puts me on hold for 7 minutes.

She comes back. Says she will escalate. Puts me on hold again as she transfers the line to the dedicated team.

I wait a few more minutes. She’s now back. Telling me sorry, no one’s there. They’ll get back to me in 1-2 business days.

I say thanks. She says she’ll send a survey after the call to ask how Google did.
There’s no survey. Not after the call, nor in my inbox.

Thankfully (or maybe finally), I get an email a few hours later from the specialist telling me the account was disabled because we didn’t switch to the new billing policy. We just gotta go through hoops to get ourselves set up on monthly invoices.

Great. Would have been nice to learn this before the account was suspended.

According to everything I read, this was supposed to have been sent by email, but I crawled every email from Google for the past 3 months and there was no email.

So yeah, I guess that’s where we are.

Arguably the world’s wealthiest and most powerful company trims costs to the point that they can’t give noise cancelling headsets to their unlucky support staff in India.

Moments like these make me realize the antitrust suits looking to break up Google’s monopoly couldn’t come sooner.

Maybe if we had, I don’t know, some competition in the paid ads market, we might see innovations like different competitors trying to offer us reasons to stick with them.

As opposed to just accepting the enshitification of everything we once loved.

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The Mask of the Black Sun – Call of Cthulhu Game Module Now Out

Apparently I’m a game designer too now. Or at least a module creator for an existing system.

My module for the 7th Edition of the pen and paper game system Call of Cthulhu RPG was just finalized and released over on Drive Thru RPG.

The Mask of the Black Sun – A Taggart Agency Mystery

You can get your copy priced at “pay what you will” which could be anything from free to five bucks to whatever you want.

Putting the module together has been a bit of a long road.

It was based off a game session I created and ran with the guys during the COVID Pandemic. However, that session was also based off a previously written and unreleased short story involving some of the characters and locations.

After we played the scenario through, I then compiled it into a document and originally sent it to the folks at Chaosium (the publishers of the game system) who gave it a favourable review and some helpful criticism.

From there, I was pointed to the Miskatonic Repository, where most of the materials for the game system live that are created by the community.

A couple of edits later, including use from Canva, some public domain images, and PDF tools from The Homebrewery later and I got a module up and for sale.

My main hope, other than being able to actually promote it and get some traction on it, is to make a couple more of these while I still have the time.

Some of the flavour text I put together for it (which you can find on the site too):

“This is it – the case that will turn our fortunes around!” Cries Mike Taggart, as he hands you an Adair Company telegram that smells faintly of a woman’s perfume and contains an offer too good to refuse.

It’s no secret that the Taggart Agency, Salem Falls’ once prestigious detective agency has fallen on hard times. First, there was Mike’s longtime partner Solomon Drake calling it quits and starting his rival agency, and then Mike turned to the bottle, and, well, you know how the rest of it goes. Since then, the agency’s been on a slow, downward slide into obscurity, but Mike just received a promising telegram that has a solid case written all over it.

Elizabeth Parlee, one of the richest folks in town, wants someone to retrieve a mysterious relic – the titular Mask of the Black Sun – that was recently stolen. She claims it’s a priceless heirloom that reminds her of her recently departed and world-traveled husband, but rumours are that the mask was once used in rituals as strange as they were dangerous.

Who could have stolen the mask, and for what purpose? And why was this telegram addressed to Mike’s old partner Solomon anyways?

A 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu Module for new and experienced players
The Mask of the Black Sun is a brief standalone campaign meant to be completed in a single game session (2-4 hours). It’s set in the fictional Canadian city of Salem Falls, New Brunswick and takes place during the classic Cthulhu era of the 1920s.

Some highlights from the campaign:

  • Send your investigators through a short scenario that involves investigative and combat elements, along with a few dastardly spells.
  • There are a number of ways in which the investigators can progress through the events, and some helpful tips for the keeper to push them along if they get stuck.
  • Experience a creepy build-up ripe with occult references and some shocking visuals to get your players spooked during the climax of the game session.
  • The Keeper will have the opportunity to roleplay various NPCs, including some goons from a rival agency who can interrupt events at opportune moments.
  • Players can take on the role of pre-rolled Investigators or create new ones for this session.
  • This is the first standalone campaign set within Salem Falls and the Taggart Agency. Stay tuned for additional adventures.

Module created by Alexander Nachaj of Quest & Cartridge.

As mentioned above, you can pick it up for whatever you want.

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Is Reddit the current champion of Google’s SERP Rankings? Maybe.

Midjourney’s interpretation of “Reddit at the top of the SERP results”

If you’ve been following SEO and search ranking updates lately from Google and others from the digital marketing crowd, you’ve probably have heard recently that Google has been favouring content from “user-generated sites.”

This also apparently includes any content that has a personal (or first-person) viewpoint.

Now, the potential for this to give smaller, niche blogs a boost is pretty evident. Anything where the author is writing from their own personal experiences or putting themselves into the story would seem like the most immediate beneficiaries, as opposed to, say, an ecommerce store or any blog that resorts to a more corporate speak style of voice.

However, the largest winner lately seems to be none other than Reddit.

The one-time self-styled front page of the internet is a massive community. Estimate range from 850 million monthly users and somewhere between 40 and 50 million daily ones.

While not all of those millions of users are producing content daily, many of them are – and by the nature of the site and its discussions, its almost entirely stories, experiences, and commentary written in the first person.

Anechdotally, I’ve noticed links from that site ranking more and more (and often higher and higher) than pretty much ever before. So I did a little test to see if it was largely in my head or if maybe rankings are starting to really favour that site.

For the first test, I tried a couple of Google searches about SEO that included the word “Reddit.”

Now, normally, if you include a brand name in the search Google gives it some priority, so you can expect to see content from them but also discussion from other sites, news, what have you.

In this case, my first assumption was that any of these searches might point me to either SEO or marketing blogs discussing the platform.

Instead, in almost all cases, the first 10-25 results were exclusively URLs from Reddit.

Take for example some of these searches:

  • is reddit a good site for seo
  • why do people use reddit
  • is google favouring reddit in search rankings
  • does google give reddit favourable rankings

Here are some screens that capture what the results were like.

t was a bit of an eye opener, if I can be honest, so I tried to test from some more angles.

The usually reliable “what are some sites like X” and then adding “Reddit” did a little better, but still had roughly 50% of the results coming from Reddit itself.

Another angle I tried was comparing searches to other brands and those from Reddit. In this case, I tested “is nike an unethical brand” – which seems to be a perennial question people ask the internet about shortly after discovering the origins of their shoes – and then the same thing for Reddit.

In the case of Nike, well, it looks like the rest of the world has something to say about this.

For Reddit, I stopped counting after about 30 results from Reddit.

Now, in all honesty, it’s probably because Nike’s checkered past (and ongoing present) is more of a news item that the same question about Reddit.

I tried another sarcastic search, this time asking “is reddit the worst site on the internet” and of the first 15 results, two were not from the platform:

  • 1x from Quora (a Q&A site that predominantly is told via first-person, and which I am frankly surprised did not appear more often.
  • x1 from the Steam forums (another source of user experiences).

This got me thinking. What about searching for video game related topic, such as with “what are the best videogames of 2024”.

Well… fortunately, most of the top results were rightly from major digital publishers such as GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, and their ilk.

But right there in the middle of the page was a Reddit discussion.

And not only that, but it ranked higher than several games-only focused publishers such as PCGamesN and Game Rant.

In sum, while this was no more than a selective survey, Reddit’s ranking power certainly seems to be on the rise.

Looking at the big picture, I can see a few things coming from this unless there is a change.

  • Reddit and its communities to grow even faster (why wouldn’t you join if more than half the results of any search come from there?)
  • People start using other search engines. If Google is basically just a glorified Reddit search, why not head over to Duck Duck Go or even TikTok for some variety in your content.
  • It’s probably already hurting a lot of smaller websites. Ones that are struggling to compete with Reddit.
  • It may be a long term win for the sites that are already using personal voices in their content over impersonal, robotic verbage.
  • Could it help prioritize real, human content over AI powered content? We’ll have to see – but hopefully!