"Yes, I do mind holding and listening to terrible classical."

Years ago when I was a younger and happier kid, I picked up a phone to complain about a misplaced order from an online paintball company. Armed with my receipts, order numbers, and every ingredient needed to remedy the problem quickly, I was foolish enough to think that I would even to get talk to a real, live human being from the get go. Instead I was greeted by a slow talking automated voice telling me to "listen to the menu options as they have recently changed."

I could go into the mundane details of the following maze of numbers and commands that it took to finally reach a real person but I won't. Instead, I will sum the event up by saying that the entire phone call- one that should have lasted not 10 minutes- ended after 35 painstaking minutes of enduring what this particular company called customer support.

And that leads me to the point of this article- why the hell is it so hard to find good customer support now? Sure, running across bad customer support in your time of customer need isn't what most people would call a rare occurrence. But it does blow my mind how widespread this problem seems to be. And while complaining about it is an expected side effect from nearly every run-in, I have to say that my recent problems with Twitter have been off the scale.

Last week I discovered the unfortunate news that something went wrong in some computer somewhere in the work and that someone had their Twitter account stop working. And that someone is me, Chad Waite, the social media geek who uses and loves Twitter like he would a love three-legged puppy.

But I have now had to shoot that puppy dead because of it's awful customer support. After long nights spent awake trying to figure out who to contact, writing emails, and replying to endless automated computer responses, I can officially say that I have yielded no positive results, eventually giving in and making a new Twitter account (@fakeitvchad) as I try to restore my old one.

Yes, I know Twitter is a free service, and yes, I know that they are unfunded and probably cannot afford a massive service department that has to deal with scores of people just like me. But I am also surprised that they don't prepare for this kind of situation when organizing the company in it's infancy. So often I hear of companies who pride themselves on their customer service and how that should be the reason to choose them. But shouldn't good customer service be a universal part of every company? After all, we have invested our time and in most cases our money in them. Shouldn't they do the same for us?

-- Chad Waite, Daily Derbi

P.S. Pretty damn good ending there, eh? I rather liked it.