CURSE CONT. These days I find it a lot easier to get spitting mad at institutions than at politicians, even. Chase's unhelpfulness mirrors a pattern I've found in many utilities and services. People complain and complain about customer service, and the companies dump billions into CRM and related training and technologies as a "response" to these complaints. They also drill into into their reps' heads that customer service is important, which mainly translates to some increased touchy-feeliness in their scripts -- how often have you heard a rep assure you that it is his or her goal to provide you with "outstanding" (or "excellent") service?

But there's not a lot the reps can do, because it is too often in the interest of the institutions themselves to prevent you from getting what you need.

Think about free-magazine deals. Once you've taken the free magazine, the company has a vested interest in keeping you from cancelling the automatic subscription that's supposed to kick in sometime afterward. They'll put you on hold forever, lose your trouble ticket, offer you some other premium -- whatever it takes to keep you from registering a final and irrefutable cancellation. Suddenly the nice people who gave you a free magazine turn into greedhead sharks.

With big companies it's subtler. First off, you're usually over a barrel: you need a key service rendered, and your only leverage is a threat is to pull your business. But what if they don't care? What if their income mostly derives from much bigger clients -- and an eternally-replenished pool of little fish like yourself? You can go on and pull out -- and endure the massive hassle of transferring providers (usually with fat fees tied on the end). Or you can stand and fight -- and realize that, however many assurances you get that the rep is doing all he or she can, the system is hard-wired to give you as little as it can get away with.

Jules Feiffer had a gag years ago about trouble with the phone company: "You can always take your business to one of our many competitors." Ma Bell was a monopoly then. Well, today we have phone companies out the ass -- and they all act more or less the same. They'll offer you free minutes, hours, cell phones, anything -- and when the going gets tough they'll stonewall you and dare you to fall off the vine, because who needs your piddleyshit patronage when their major scrilla is coming from giant corporate accounts and their own endless mergers and acquisitions?

There are all kinds of good arguments against the consolidation of everything, but the best one I know is that it leaves increasingly fewer vendors with any vested interest in the satisfaction of us peons. When everything on earth is owned by Gog and Magog, try getting an extra phone line put in before September.

They'll probably instruct their agents to break out the phone sex ("Welcome to Magog! It's my goal today to make you cum all over my tits!"), but in the end you still won't get your money shot.