It has been confirmed that opening the conversation with “I have filed a complaint against you with the FCC and the number is 12-C00398725″  gives the phone rep a stronger case to make to her supervisor to get the right technical people involved to get it done.  It still takes persistence and effective communication.  Being an IT person helps only in that it makes me fully aware that the technical constraints we are battling are nonsense. The limitations are self-imposed choices by the marketing dept, designed to bring in business, not serve customers.  In the end we did get the right people on the phone and got it done.

What is scary is the amount of dumbness that is purposely imparted to the staff as knowledge.  It is a dark side of the tech culture that large hoards of people are fed contrived nonsense by marketers and told it is gospel truth of technology as if it were physical laws of the universe.

Folks -  Technology does what you tell it to do.  Don’t be satisfied with one of those “That’s just the way it is” computer stories about how “the system only lets me do this or that”.  Somebody is in charge and it isn’t HAL.