Dark UI patterns on the verizonfios website (opens in new tab)

"Dark UI patterns" seems a little over the top to me, I think it might be attributable to Hanlon's Razor. Probably some lazy programmer at Verizon stubbed in some code then forgot about it or moved on and no one remembered to go back and put in the actual code to find the actual wait time, or they couldn't figure out how to do it so just put bs in.

Saw that. Makes you wonder about other BS we see or hear when we call for support. "Our agents are busy with other customers. You are in #5 with a 25 min wait" hoping you'll hang up and drop the support request.

In my personal experience 99% of everything today is fake.

I don't see how this is necessarily a dark pattern.

The code fetches some sort of number serverside, and then randomly updates it.

It's pointless anyways, my guess is the marketing company that made that page has no actual integration with the IVR system.

Whoa. Getting pretty well shared around the web.

I want to be clear that it seems there is an attempt at accurate data: https://twitter.com/rikschennink/status/736618354098737152?s... but the implementation is a completely failure.

I won't take their part in this but, having owned a software company since 2009 already, I know there are certain "lazy" individuals who prefer to submit such code just to close those issues faster. I know we are supposed to check the code commits more carefully but code like this one sometimes gets into production...It could also be a mock that made it into production.

You assume too much malice from people, and too little problems with enterprise integrations.

My guess is that the spec said to use the real number, and when the team couldn't deliver that, after six failed months of repeated attempts to integrate, they had to put something in because it was too late to change the ui wireframe that had already been signed off by executives.