I actually have a story where attempting to contact the CEO of a company 
did the trick.

A few years back, DSL speeds in Spain were pretty subpar. In an effort 
to improve connectivity (and because people were complaining and saying 
that we were behind the rest of the world), all customers of this 
particular telco and all the ISPs that use their infrastructure had 
their connection speeds doubled, keeping the price (this has happened a 
few times now).

Originally, I had a 256kbps download line. After the doubling, my router 
synced up correctly at 512kbps. However, my download speed was closer to 
64kbps. At times, worse than dialup. However, the contract only 
guarantees 10% of the dowload capability at any one time. NOTE: this is 
NOT like cable where often you share one big fat pipe with your 
neighbors. Here you're supposed to be able to get close to maxing out 
your connection. The 10% thing is just what they do to cover their 
backsides when things go awry.

Anyway, since they were legally covered, no amount of customer support 
calls fixed the problem. They either insisted it was a problem on MY 
side, that there was no problem, or that they wouldn't do anything about 
it. Every call to customer support involved the usual complete 
re-configuration of the router and system (nevermind the fact that I run 
Linux, and they often don't even know what Linux is). I've since stopped 
doing anything - I just follow along while walking around, pretending to 
do what they tell me to do. Makes things go faster.

After several months of this, I sent a desperate e-mail CC'd to the CEO 
and all other directives whose e-mails I could find. I also played 
another card: my father owned an (at the time) very expensive 2mbps line 
for his office with the same company, and we threatened to cancel that 
too. Guess what, days later a mystery tech called us and got the problem 
fixed. A misconfiguration on their side (I'm going to bet the original 
tech fat-fingered 52kbps instead of 512kbps into their configuration 
interface or something as stupid as that). Unfortunately, he refused to 
provide us his telephone number, so we had to resort to customer support 
for any further problems (which thankfully weren't nearly as annoying as 
this one).

-- 
Hector Martin (hector@marcansoft.com)
Public Key: http://www.marcansoft.com/marcan.asc

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