The worst one, or at least the one that springs immediately to mind, has to do with British Gas attempting to take my mother to court over an unpaid gas and electricity bill. That the rather large bill in question represented charges levied post my grandfather’s death, the closure of his account, the subsequent sale of the house, and the establishment of a new account under the name of the house’s new owners seemed to matter not a jot. They also seemed to miss the fact that, as a consequence of their organisational stupidity and insensitivity, and my Mum’s understandable upset and fury, they were under investigation by the ombudsman.

You are aware that it’s relatively easy to sic a lawyer on their arses? Think it is anyway, a friend of mine paid someone a very small amount of money to get their pennies back from Setanta when actually providing a service proved too difficult for them. Not as difficult, apparently, as taking his money over a period of months

My esperience with Tiscali was back before I moved to London—there was an issue with my dial-up connection that they simply wouldn’t fix, and it was blocking me from accessing a website I was co-admin for at the time.

I eventually tried a pay-per-minute Wanadoo (now something else, Orange?) connection and got there first time.

A year later, Tiscali threatened me with bailiffs as they’d never cancelled my account. I’m guessing they all have good and bad times.

I recall when my student house got Eurobell installed (before they also merged into Virgin) the subcontractor made a massive botch of the job, the head of region visited, got it all fixed and gave us several months free as an apology, that impressed me.

I will say this, though: Your comparison between the two phone companies is not a fair one – one of them know they’ve lost you as a customer and treat you accordingly, the other are trying to win you as a new customer. Mind you, I still think that BT’s behaviour is a bad business decision – if I’m not misinterpreting your post, you’ll never ever do business with them again. Just like I won’t ever do business again with a certain company I promised not to mention anymore in the course of this comment.