Here’s a modern tale. I recently had a bad experience with a phone company. Eventually, the company wanted to make it right – so it reached out over social media. Sounds good, right?

It wasn’t. I refused. I’m cancelling my service – and I’d like to be clear on why.

The difference between good relationships and bad relationships is that good relationships are about maintenance, but bad relationships are all about retention. Take the phone company I was with last year. It was only a couple of months after I moved houses and switched providers that the stalker mail started to arrive.

“You are always welcome here,” said the big print on one letter. It was followed by a notepad that had “Come back to [our] affordability and reliability…” printed on every single page. Come back! Flip. Come back! Flip. Come back!

Soon there arrived a most discomfiting glossy flyer, the kind that prints your name right into the advertising.

“Ivor Tossell,” it said, “we could never forget about you.”

I looked out the window to make sure the phone company wasn’t staring at me from a parked car across the street, just to be safe.

I was learning the one thing most Canadians already know about their phone companies: They only treat you well when you treat them poorly. I’m not going to name the companies because you know their names – and, more to the point, they’re fundamentally interchangeable.

Sure enough, things got even more psychotic with the company I switched to – the Other Phone Company. The Other Phone Company bungled the installation of my cable so badly that a year later I’m still getting bills in which one page is addressed to me and the other is addressed to another guy.

Sorting this out became the standard M.C. Escher nightmare, where the problem can only be solved by a department that is not the department you’re talking to now. No matter how many notes they write on your account, the problem is new to them every time.

Eventually, I became convinced that every phone in the company had a big red button labelled NOT MY PROBLEM, over which agents’ fingers hover precipitously from the moment you call.

The only way to get through to someone helpful, I discovered, was to refuse to pay and hang up the phone in frustration. Then they’d have a senior troubleshooter call back. Even then, the best he would give me was another number to call.

One day, I was cut off after an unhelpful call for the umpteenth time. I took the preferred recourse of the 21st-century consumer: I pitched a fit online. I did it on Twitter. I told my story and threatened to leave the company in favour of a small provider. If no one else, the folks who monitor Twitter for any mentions of their company heard my threat.

Miracle! In short order, not one but two representatives of the Other Phone Company contacted me, offering to do what their customer-service wings had staunchly refused to do: take responsibility for untangling my case and see it through to a conclusion. It was classic social-media outreach. Monitor the Web for a problem, then swoop in to offer help.

Call us, they said, and we’ll sort this out. I refused. And this is why.

In the bizarro-world of Canada’s big telecoms, good customer service is the last thing they offer. I mean that quite literally – good customer service is chronologically the last thing I was offered.

The Other Phone Company was using social media as a retention tool. I had been grumbling online for many months, without hearing a peep. It was only when I loudly threatened to leave that the Twitter-based social-media representatives rushed in.

The whole thing is manifestly, magnificently backward. Here’s a medium that has the potential to nip problems in the bud. Here’s a tool that offers a relief valve from the cattle pens of corporate customer care. Properly staffed and smartly used, it holds out the chance of a truly tailored and positive experience for a change. But how is it used instead? Customer retention.

If there’s one thing that slays me, it’s the fact that these companies all but force me to have a bad relationship with them. To get service, I have to threaten, hang up, walk away, cajole, do all kinds of things I don’t like doing. I don’t relate to my friends this way. I don’t relate to my bank this way. I don’t even relate to Air Canada this way, for crying out loud. This is not the consumer I want to be.

A relationship should not be built on the premise that after unspecified mistreatments you can always make it up at crunch time. It should not be marked by an escalating series of destructive, attention-getting manoeuvres punctuated by diving for your partner’s feet as he walks out the door. If you console yourself with the thought that you can always hector your love for months afterward until you win him back, yours is not a good relationship.

It’s hard to escape a bad relationship with an oligopoly. But as long as options exist, I’m going to keep trying. Goodbye, Other Phone Company: I look forward to your stalker mail, too.