My takeaway from the article is that the author's father just didn't deal with bullshit from companies.
I can tell you for sure I'll never use any of the bells. I'll go without a phone before I use any of them. Why? Because I had a weird charge show up on my bill 1 day. I called them, they told me it was a mistake and took it off. It showed up on the next bill. I called them, they told me it was a mistake and took it off.
This went on for a while until I eventually moved to another house. Down the road I find out that that mysterious charge somehow came back and then got sent to collections. This happened 25+ years ago and time hasn't tempered my feelings on the matter at all.
Same thing with my mobile. I went through AT&T & Sprint, leaving both of them early over some bullshit, and it will be a cold day in hell before I ever give them my money again. I eventually landed on Verizon and haven't had any issues for the roughly 10 years that I've been using them.
I still remember the day I got a huge bill from Sprint due to running over my minutes. I call them up and I shit you not the person on the phone told me they could give me the details of everything on that bill except for the 2 days in the middle of the month that I supposedly used up all my minutes. They could tell me who I called and for how long the day before those 2 days, and the day after, but not those 2 days. Oh, and also, if I pay right now while I'm on the phone they'll give me a discount on those minutes! I cancelled my account right then and there.
It's not unreasonable to expect a company to be able to tell you what they're charging you for.
Or Cox. I hate them with the passion of a thousand burning suns. If there were a viable alternative I'd be gone in a second. Just this Friday my internet goes out so I call them up. Do you know what the man on the phone led with? That my equipment is old. He started to blame that on the outage. The best part? It's a docsys 3 modem that's not even 5 years old. I told him in no uncertain terms that the reason it's "old" is because it works and doesn't need to be replaced. I had to convince this jackass that the problem wasn't on my end. Then he started trying to lecture me on how it must be my internal equipment. Only it wasn't my internal equipment because at some point it just miraculously started working again.
I have NO tolerance for bullshit from companies. I don't setup autopay for anything, I sit down every month and manually pay bills. Why? Because I've had companies believe I owed them money I didn't believe I owed and had them just straight up pull it from my account.
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My point here is that the feeling I got from the article is that this isn't about simple fanboyism, but about having high expectations of companies.