where's the "service" in customer service anymore

I'm shocked, and stressed now. I've been on the phone ALL day with various customer service agents at various companies changing our address, service info, phone numbers etc... These are fairly simple requests that I'm making. I have currently been holding on and off now for 44 minutes and counting just to change our billing address on our auto loan. Wow. This is like phone call number 6 today and I'm going to lose my mind.

Half of the agents just have bad attitudes, the other one that I about lost my cool with didn't know there was a state named Iowa in the USA and I had to repeat the spelling of Iowa 4 times to her. Really? Who was your 6th grade geography teacher - I'd like to chat with them briefly. Now I'm trying to cancel a gym membership here and they need basically the promise of my first born or a DNA strain in order to cancel it and will conveniently continue billing me monthly until they get just that. Finally, this agent won't let me change my billing address on my auto loan because they had my birthdate in the system wrong. I wasn't verifying all the security information with them correctly in order for them to talk to me about the account. Which part of me appreciates except I haven't stolen my own identity. I am now being punished because some other customer service agent keyed my birthday into the system wrong by ONE digit. I promise, I know my own birthday - it comes on the same day every single year.

Where is the service? Mostly, I love how at the end of every call they thank you in some way for being a loyal customer and ask if they can help with anything else today - I'm scared to ask them to do anything else since these simple requests have taken me six hours to complete? What if I had a major request??? I might die with my phone glued to my ear?!

So, there you have it. My soap box rant today - my brain hurts. I remember my mother's famous words as I grew up: "You don't have to be perfect, you just have to try a little bit harder and you will be miles above the rest of the world" Obviously I tried a little too hard...

Just for fun - I googled customer service hall of shame. I found that three of the companies I had to deal with today were on the top ten list of WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE.

Sigh...next phone call