Sooo... anecdote.

My phone (and Internet) company only allowed switching to a different plan (for phone and Internet at home) when at least two years had passed since the initial contract. So there still was about a month before I could do anything, their web interface would not let me switch the plan and instead told me the above.

So the day after the two years are over I go back to the web form to switch my plan - only this time they told me "it's too late, you should have told us before the two years period is over. We have extended your contract by another year and you cannot make a switch during that time - please come back in a year!"

I had tried to switch a month prior and it didn't work!

So I asked them. Nicely. Only got the standard response (copy and paste of a text block). I asked again. Still quite nicely. The same. Then no more reaction at all.

NOTE: The plan I switched to was better for THEM too! They wanted to switch as many people as possible to VoIP and that is what I wanted to get, and I still paid the same. More speed - but that doesn't really make a difference to them, and I don't even use it apart from very rare and very brief peaks. There were articles in the newspaper about the trouble they had getting people to switch to VoIP which they needed for cost-cutting, and how they tried to bait them. I volunteered!

I switched to full-out asshole behavior. I send them an email several times a day (and I know they can't just suppress it, it was a new ticket each time). I called them several times.

My thought process: If I'm nice they can just ignore me. No disadvantage for them at all. So instead I tried to raise their costs. Since they can't ignore the tickets and the calls - they don't know it's me - I calculated that they would react when it costs them money, when I occupy real people's time.

A week later I had the new contract.

I regret nothing.

PS: It was Deutsche Telekom.

-------------------------------------

By the way, bonus content, speaking about assholes here is what I found is the best way to be an asshole in Internet forums. I found out the hard way - by finding out what I myself found hardest to ignore when getting trolled.

- You must not be emotionally invested. The best trolling can be done when you yourself don't care at all, when whatever you write is more like "work", you just "have to get it done".

- Important: Act stupid! Nothing affects people as deeply as having a complete idiot troll them. It also makes the first rule easier, because you don't need to think. You can just write whatever. The best thing is to exude complete confidence but post something completely irrelevant, but not too much so: It must be believable that you seem to believe your irrelevant link as proof of your opinion is indeed relevant. Acting-stupid behavior also makes it much more believable that the responses don't get through to you, so you deprive the other person of the satisfaction of trolling you.

- Don't bother replying right away! Let the other person think it's over. A new message out of the blue 3 days later has significantly more impact because they don't expect it and think they are safe. This goes with the first rule, 3 days later you have no emotional connection to the original conversation and probably forgot all about it. So sending replies so much later indeed is just a chore without emotional involvement.

I think in order to fight trolling one has to first understand where its power lies.

The last rule has implications for criticizing anyone in real life: You get the worst reaction when it's not expected. So in order to make criticizing e.g. of co-workers safer for everybody we could introduce times, for example once per week, where we announce that the only allowed conversation is something critical. Just a thought. Something along those lines, obviously needs more thinking and needs to be adapted to the local situation.