Pick small companies
Today i got a letter from Eneco, our energy provider (gas & power), that they noticed no supplier was registered as delivering service to our home address so they would have to stop the gas & power coming to our house within 10 days. Slightly weird since i’ve switched suppliers to Greenchoice in october of last year. I called Eneco, only reachable on working days, i then called Greenchoice (on a saturday morning) and got someone on the line after two rings. This apparently is a known problem as he had my request id’s at hand which i could then pass on to Eneco so they would be able to find the Greenchoice request (from october last year) and mark our account as “ok”. Eneco corporate had not been able to get a transfer request to filter down their systems into the computers of their office that manages the actual network, in 6 months time. So now i had to help them by phoning in the actual id’s of the database sets with my account information in them.
Eneco is not alone in being big and lumpy, i have similar experiences with UPC (big & scary), KPN (big & clueless) and companies like Accenture are not known as Accidenture in the IT world for nothing. There seems to be an inverse relationship between size and customer service that is apparent for every big company i ever had dealings with, professional or otherwise.
In a perfect world i would never have to deal with any company with more than 50 employees. Luckily networked companies can build and sell anything from cars to power networks to food stuffs using networks of small motivated companies instead of single big lumpy ones. Pick those and it will improve your quality of life 
oh… and that means i will have to find alternatives to Yahoo and Google’s collection of services too i guess if i want to ‘eat my own medicine/poison’. Any ideas on that?