At one point, I signed up with a giant phone company for almost everything: TV, internet, phone and maybe groceries, pest control and the occasional haircut or tire rotation. The package deal wasn't massively overpriced, but it certainly wasn't cheap. Then, just a few months later, the price shot up dramatically. When I tried to check my account online, the service was down. For the third time that week. Even the landline.

I called Telco Gigantico on my cell in high dudgeon. Very high dudgeon. I'd say the dudgeon was about as high as dudgeon gets. I'd guess it was shoulder-deep, but that might reveal that I have absolutely no idea what dudgeon is. The unfortunate soul at the telco who was certainly not paid nearly enough to deal with all that dudgeon immediately transferred me to what she called "the Kick Department." I later discovered kick was spelled K-I-C-Q — as in Keep Irate Customers from Quitting.

KICQ promptly cut the cost — all the way back to just a few dollars more than the original rate. After that, every few months the bill would increase for the TV or the internet or maybe just for the hell of it. Or possibly, to see if I was paying attention. Since I made my living talking about that kind of thing, I was. Also, I'm kind of a fan of not being ripped off by unfeeling bureaucratic behemoths.

I'd just call and threaten to cancel everything. And the good folks at KICQ would trim my bill. I never actually intended to cancel. The only alternative internet service provider was a satellite service which I hated and which, it turned out, this telco also owned. One gigantic telco or another apparently owns everything that Amazon doesn't own, except Facebook (Meta), Microsoft, Apple and Danny's Discount Drain Opening in Mishawaka, Indiana.

(FYI, I've subsequently threatened to quit the electric and the gas company as well as my bank and a surgeon who was just about to carve my skull open. Nobody else ever reduced the bill. The surgeon slipped a mask over my nose and mouth and when I came to, the deed was done. At full price. They don't let dummies into medical school.)

Initially, when I'd call the telco, I'd reach a genuine human almost instantly. That must have violated some ISP commandment, because hold times quickly shot up to an appropriately annoying amount. As for their actual services, it was one problem after another. Though that improved significantly when one of their techs finally realized that, years before, we'd been given an outmoded modem. "You were using the spirit of St. Louis to do the work of the space shuttle," he explained.

"I guess we're lucky we survived," I joked. Frighteningly, he seemed completely serious when he agreed.

Dealing with Telco Gigantico for TV and internet felt like dealing with a start-up. Judging them as a company with over a hundred years' experience, it was hard to understand why they didn't have it more together. Judging them as a start-up, however, they could have been worse.

I was an early subscriber to a dial-up ISP when calls from their sixteen million customers were all seemingly routed to a single confused grandmother in Mumbai. That may be a slight exaggeration. But their customer service probably had a lot to do with the monumental lack of success they've enjoyed ever since. That's even though they had a huge head start on the industry. And almost everyone in America over 50 experienced their first email with them. I guess you never forget your first. And that's not necessarily a positive. Consider the insulting Christmas card I still get every year from Sharon Boyajian.

Check out Barry Maher's dark humor supernatural thriller, "The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon on Amazon. Sign up for his Substack at www.barrymaher.com.

To find out more about Barry Maher and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Ajeet Mestry at Unsplash