Earlier this year, I got myself a Motorola RAZR, switched from T-Mobile to Cingular, and got a family plan with my wife, who'd been with Cingular for years.

I just spent two hours on the phone with their customer service people trying to straighten out my bill, which did some very weird things that ultimately ended up over-charging me by about $22. To avoid a long rant, let me merely say that their default style of rattling off numbers, rapid fire, in no particular relation to where they occur on the bill, is not a productive way of convincing a customer that the bill might actually be correct. Once I started working through it, line by line, we eventually reached agreement.

What a pain. I think the moral of this story, if there is one, is that the two hours I spent weren't worth the $22 I ended up saving, even though about half of that was listening to hold music and web surfing.