It was so fun when we moved... because living in a really small town, where the phone company used to be an independent local company (in the days of Ma Bell) we could tell Comcast "We'd really like to, but you don't provide service in our new area". Even then, they still tried to sell us service, until someone (about 3 "specialists" down the line) actually looked up our new address (it wasn't even on the post office roster back then) and said, well, gee, we can't provide service to your address"...

Evil? Try Sirius/XM. My receiver was destroyed (fell off a roof, which was followed by a 10# sledgehammer right before my other half "accidentally" backed over it - curious, that!) and I called to cancel. Promised to cancel my service (after numerous sales pitches, never mind I didn't have an XM receiver any more) but... never did. Called them again, same story, same result. Called a third time, with a voice recorder going, told them I was recording the call, and they disconnected. Hmm...

Fourth time. Recorded it with a soft "beep" in the background... got all the way to a retention manager, got his name, told him the story, how I had talked to 4 people before him, plus 2 other calls, got his promise that the service would be cancelled, then told him "Do you hear that beep?" He said I was wondering what that was... I told him the call was being recorded. He started telling me how couldn't do anything on a recorded line, and I told him he already had, and the "beep" was letting him know it was being recorded...

The account was closed in 48 hours.

I worked at a super regional ISP back in the day. It was a pretty amazing experience. When we were Execpc we all knew that we had a job, that job was to make happy customers, who would then pay money and make the owner happy. Bob was the owner, and he was awesome. So, we never felt bad about doing the right thing as we also knew that when Execpc needed money to expand he was essentially betting his house on it. Then we got bought out by Voyager.net and while the C*O's were a collection of jackasses they got a few things right. They understood the value of good customer service and spared nothing in its pursuit. In the end mismanagement by the jackass C*o's was only a small part of what brought Voyager.net down. The biggest problem was that since we did not have the telco licences we would have needed to start actually deploying our own broadband, or at least allowing us to deal directly with the telcos in selling dsl service left us in no position to move well from dial up provider to home broadband. Heck, it made it fairly painful to even provide t1's or better to our b2b customers. The funny part is that supposedly we are better off since the Ma-Bell monopoly was broken. But, Ma-Bell was way the hell better, and aside from long distance cheaper than the baby-bells and cable/wireless folks. The sadder part is we are headed back to a monopoly, but not one of excellence.. Instead we will have one built by campaign contributions...