Next time the supervisor gets a lot of questions and request for id information. No answer and up the ladder another rung. It will at least be fun if I know I am screwing with them.

Then a call back to verify supervisor status.

Write down names. First and last (which they hate to give up) and time spoken to. It helps later down the line on say, the fifth or sixth person you speak with. If all else fails, tell them to turn your service off, you will go with another provider. You will be suddenly paying less per month and have twice as many channels.

Yes, Joyce W. is absolutely right. We have friends who get cable, internet AND phone service from Comcast for less than we pay for the same service minus the phone. But given my experience, there is just NO WAY I will trust my phone service to this company!

What I really like is when I get a service representative who is willing to give me his or her name, plus the "private line" phone number for follow-up calls. It is rare, but it does sometimes happen.

About the same time that I was in and out of MCI in Hunt Valley, I was also in and out of Equitable Insurance in the Inner Harbor. In going through a pile of files I came across one - it had clearly been misfiled - bearing the name of a friend's evil ex-husband. Seems he was wrangling with the Ins Co and one of the people with whom he'd dealt wrote:

"Mr X is very annoying to deal with. He writes down the date and time of every conversation as well as almost every word spoken. He makes a big deal of writing down verbatim what's just been said to him and then asking, 'Do I have that correct?' He quotes entire conversations as well as dates, times and names."

Eve, I totally understand where Mr. X was coming from!