Today's customer service commentary comes to you courtesy of Disney, owners of the ABC television network. Disney and Cablevision (metropolitan New York cable TV provider) have been unable to come to an agreement over Cablevision's retransmission of WABC programming. At midnight this morning, Disney pulled the plug, leaving 3 million households without one of the country's major TV networks. The timing was clearly intended to tick people off, as it took place the day of the Academy Awards. This is Mickey Mouse politics at its best, figuratively and literally.

Dear Google,

While traveling through Boston Logan airport, I had the pleasure of using internet service that you sponsored. Free internet in the airport--what a concept! Thanks, I appreciate you thinking of the holiday travelers!

--Pat

[I usually reserve "Paging Customer Service" posts for poor customer service, but sometimes somebody exceeds my expectations and merits mention. This one is a happy post!]

Spam is one of the scourges of email as we currently know it. I use a spam filter, SpamAssassin, which prevents 1500-2000 spams per day from entering my mail system. However, sometimes things sneak by and end up in one of my mailboxes. This happens to me just a few times each week, and I could ignore it easily enough when I see it happen.

One of the moments I've feared has happened. The director's cut of a movie I'd like to purchase, Terminator: Salvation, is going to be made available on Blu-Ray only. I can't imagine that there's any content that requires Blue-Ray to enjoy, therefore I am attributing this decision to darker ulterior motives at Warner Brothers.

Subject: Rescheduling of the 2009 Men's Ice Hockey Champion Banner Ceremony
Sender: Patrick Madden
Recipient: jparker@bu.edu , mlynch@bu.edu
Copy: nrowan@bu.edu , hockey@bu.edu
Date: 16.09.2009 14:41

Dear Directors Parker and Lynch:

I just learned that BU Hockey has moved its banner raising ceremony from October 20, the first home game and traditional event for banner raisings, to October 10, a holiday weekend and exhibition game. While the article at goterriers.com explains the rationale behind this date change, the announcement comes at a late time and has not given Terriers fans enough notice for them to plan to be at the Agganis, rather than elsewhere, over a holiday weekend. I am one of the people adversely affected by this change.

Colgate is airing a new ad campaign for its SpeedStick Pro product. "What's your pit type?" The ads proceed to describe physical characteristics of armpits, which, unless you're a teenager, you probably don't want to hear about. I submitted the following comment at their website:

SpeedStick Pro. "What's your pit type" ??? Are you marketing to 18 year-olds? I'm a guy and that's about the age I used to talk about my body in those terms. This is not an appealing ad campaign for adults, it's really a turn-off. Please can it.

A few months ago, I set up a BlackBerry for a Curry College student so he could use it to get his email. This worked fine up until a few weeks ago, when BlackBerry informed the student that his account information needed to be revalidated. Revalidation failed, so I took a look at it.

All the settings looked reasonable and were as I'd left them. However, a quick look at the servers showed that they no longer accepted connections from email clients, including the POP3 service the BlackBerry had used. I thought that was odd, so I called Curry College IT to ask what was going on.

I'm soliciting quotes to have a chimney repair done. Of the four places I called, two came over promptly. One hasn't called back yet (though to be fair it's only been a few hours). And one called back promptly, but...he wants to charge me $85 to produce a quote.

File this under "Ill Considered" and "Misconfiguration"

Okay, here's one that defies all logic and explanation.

At 2:00 AM, Spike broadcasts Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9). This is an hour-long show including commercials. Comcast in Boston airs Spike on channel 33.

Comcast in Boston also airs EWTN (religious programming) on channel 33.

Cleaning out one of my mailboxes, I noticed a notification from US Airways informing me that, due to the cost of fuel, they have implemented a $25 charge for a second piece of checked baggage.

Since it's weight that causes more fuel to be used, they ought to be charging passengers by pounds of baggage times number of miles traveled rather than by the piece. Clearly they're just trying to extract more money from passengers, using fuel as the scapegoat.

US Airways, the contempt you hold your customers in is one of the reasons I avoid flying you anywhere.