Oh crud, I didn't realize anyone could read that literally. My bad: you have to know the context.

Hi, I'm a longtime AdWords customer (I spend in the mid four figures per year). It is wonderful... except that customer service is provided through Google. Or, frequently in my experience, not provided through Google.

When the algorithms are working well, AdWords is amazing. Quite literally life changing for me. But for AdWords, I'd still be at the day job.

Computer algorithms do not always work the way we'd hope they would. In many multi-billion dollar businesses run by grownups, for example banks, there are humans in the loop for when computers make mistakes, for example marking as fraudulent my $550 monthly AdWords bill. There are a variety of means by which I can contact a human at the bank, explain my problem, and get effective help at resolving it. My bank makes less than $200 off of me a year.

Google hates dealing with customers because it doesn't scale nearly so well as throwing another 10,000 cheap boxes at the problem. So they do everything possible they can to avoid having to talk to you: Matt Cutts calls these "scalable communication approaches", but when my business got essentially mothballed during busy season they felt a lot more like "You're making me click through five different screens to find the contact link and then limiting my message to 250 characters, come on guys, why don't you just write Eff Off And Die so I won't waste any time hoping for a resolution."

On submitting that message to support, I got back an autogenerated reply which was utterly non-responsive. From Google's perspective, I think we were done. Further support requests were did not succeed in reaching anyone who knew what was happening.

The problem was eventually resolved a week later -- after I had complained about it on my blog. I have no knowledge of whether complaining was causationally related to resolution but on previous incidents with Amy Hoy's Google Checkout account and at least three others I can think of off the top of my head, causing a PR issue was the only way to get attention to utterly routine issues.

In addition to these issues, the few beleaguered humans working in the borg tasked with dealing with customers are unaware of Google's own policies, ignorant of most of the information of key importance to their customers (or they hide their knowledge very well), and discouragingly forgetful of promises such as "I will escalate this and someone will get back to you."

One of my other minor frustrations: Google will hold your ad for review if it is possibly objectionable. For example, involving gambling products. I do not actually sell a gambling product, but I've had ads held for weeks or months waiting for review because I tend to use the word "bingo" a lot.

The last time I complained about this on HN, a helpful chap from a foreign Google office emailed me to give me some suggestions, saying that essentially I was likely to fall through the algorithmic crack every single time and that in addition to putting my ad through on the web interface I should immediately open a ticket asking them to review it. This answer makes him the most helpful Google employee I have ever even heard about.

I actually tweeted early today that I edited an ad yesterday and was pleasantly surprised that it was actually published. It has been several months since I've worked with AdWords actively because it is so frustrating.

Full disclosure: I am an AdWords case study.