Editorial: When service goes bad

Monday, Oct. 22, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.

Google the phrase "customer service frustrations" and 1.15 million hits come up.

The Internet search elicits tales of seemingly endless voice mail strings and of sitting on hold for eons, only to have a surly customer service representative fail to fully answer queries or complaints.

Those who have been bitten by poor customer service tell of computer "help" technicians who rarely do, appliance service workers who never show up and other annoying failures that, at the end of the day, leave consumers disgusted and discouraged. Practically everyone will, at one time or another, have such an encounter.

Perhaps that is why it is easy, on some level, to understand the frustration of Mona Shaw - a 75-year-old Virginia woman who was charged with disorderly conduct and fined $345 after she took a hammer and destroyed a customer service worker's computer at her local Comcast office.

A story by The Washington Post on Thursday described how Shaw and her husband had tried for three days to get the company to install its combined phone, cable television and Internet service, but had been left waiting for servicemen who didn't show up and who finished only half of the job when they did finally show.

The Shaws went to the Comcast office to complain in person . There a customer service representative told them to wait - on a bench outside in August's intense heat - for a manager. After the Shaws sat in the hot sun for two hours, the customer service worker told them that - you guessed it - the manager had gone home for the day, the Post reports.

That was on a Friday. Shaw returned on the following Monday with her husband and her husband's hammer. She never struck a person with the hammer, but she inflicted considerable damage to a computer and a telephone.

Of course we don't condone Shaw's behavior. Still, it is a place to which many of us have been precariously close, as the electronic voice on the other end of the line says, "Please hold for the next available representative."