I fear I am defeated.

I have always prided myself on my tenacity in dealing with large companies to whom I fall prey. If I’ve been wronged, I doggedly pursue the righting of that wrong until I succeed.

I usually have dialogues going with a handful of companies at any given time. Currently, Having just finished going around and around with Apple Computers, Best Buy and the Underwood folks, I remain in negotiations with an insurance agent that represents Farmer’s Insurance, Speakeasy (my DSL provider), and a cell phone company that shall remain nameless because it is sort of a client of mine.

Each of these companies is currently or has recently received money from me that they had no business receiving—despite my best efforts to prevent this from happening.

Because of the impossibly mindless, uncaring, unconscious inertia with which all of these entities lumber along, money is being extracted from me for services they all could and should be providing me at a lower cost. Except no one’s paying attention except me. They don’t care. They’re happy to get paid more than they’ve earned.

The system is designed, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, to wear customers down, keep them in the dark and ultimately, to defeat them, should they resist this propensity to rip people off.

For almost a year, Speakeasy extracted a large monthly charge from me for a very slow DSL line, while they were providing newer customers a much faster line for a significantly smaller monthly charge. They never notified me that this faster, cheaper service was available. If I hadn’t stumbled across this fact on my own, I’d still be being gauged by them. I wrote them a letter asking to be compensated for being overcharged and underserved. They never responded. For many companies, this strategy of simply not responding seems to be replacing the only slightly less infuriating form letter in which the non-response is carefully articulated.

The same was true with my insurance agent/company, with whom we had a very expensive, high-risk policy. Our old insurance company had cancelled us because we had the gall to initiate two claims within one year. That cancellation bumped us to high risk.

After a year or two, apparently, we were no longer considered high risk and could have switched to a less expensive, conventional policy. Except we were never notified that our time was up. As a result, we paid over $1000 of unnecessary premiums to this company before we figured out on our own that we were eligible for a far less costly policy. Neither the agent nor the insurance company felt it necessary to let us know about this.

And then there’s the cell phone company. It turns out they have a discount for teachers, of which my wife is one. But they don’t ever tell you such a discount exists. When we found this out from another teacher, we went and had the discount implemented. We thought. But the guy in customer service failed to enter something properly, and, instead, our monthly bill went up by about 30%. This went on for two months before we decided that something had gone wrong and went back to them. The process of successfully applying the discount and re-imbursing us the money we were wrongly charged because of their ineptitutde was so time-consuming, convoluted and stressful that we caved in before we were able to be fully reimbursed. We simply waved the white flag and plodded on home because we couldn’t stand to watch the customer service person fumble and stumble his way toward a resolution of the the problem any longer.

This is what worries me. In the past, I would have found the resolve to see it through, driven by my sense of indignation at being treated so disrespectfully. Lately, however, I find myself letting some of these wrongs slide. I frequent the big Century multiplex in Evanston, because they are one of the few places that runs foreign and independent movies. But, since that place opened five or six years ago, I have been raging against it for one reason or another, almost constantly. I will spare you the specifics, because the litany would render this near epic tantrum truly epic. But my confrontations with their management are becoming less frequent. Not because of any improvement on their part. Oh no. They continue to be the worst run movie theatre I’ve ever encountered. But the futility of my complaints is eroding my willingness to fight the good fight.

Complaining to companies and writing letters to the editor used to be among my very favorite hobbies. I can still get it up to shoot off a zinger to some editor or other, but the intransigence of the corporate entities against whose brick walls I bang and bloody my brain is proving less and less surmountable. At least for me.

If the few customers like me who are willing to make and maintain a stink fold their tents, what hope is there for these big, stupid companies to ever improve the way they deal with their customers? I fear I am defeated.