Great article. I just shared it with a friend and said this to him:

I just read a great long-form essay on the interconnected technology stacks and phone support models in US Retail Banking.

TL;DR: Banks are fucking complicated and expensive to run and cruft built up in systems over years lead to lots of “interesting” edge cases at the boundaries of systems.

This reminds me of some science fiction I read must be decades ago now, about some sort of “fixer” who had to resolve the problems in the systems that ran society.