At 2:20 a.m. I finally gave up, unsuccessful in my three-hour effort to restore my Internet service, which had been cut off for unexplained reasons. (No, it wasn’t a late bill payment.) The particular company I was having trouble with was Comcast, but its ratings, according to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, are in the middle of the pack for industry. It could have been practically any company turning a perfectly healthy and even-tempered person into a promising candidate for a coronary.

Clearly, if Franz Kafka were alive today he’d be writing about customer service. Just calling directory assistance can set your teeth on edge. In my case, the reps were never rude; they treated me indulgently, as if I were a mental patient who had neglected his medication. But the rules under which they operate are enough to make anyone rage against the machine.

I was lucky. At least I talked to actual human beings. The Wall Street Journal’s Jane Spencer reported last week that companies are spending billions on automated systems designed to prevent customers from reaching operators. The paper found one man who had to call AT&T WorldNet 15 times and endure 600 minutes on hold just to talk to someone.

My own “Groundhog Day” routine involved sitting on hold–often for the length of a sitcom–for “the first available customer representative,” who insisted on hearing the details of my situation (which I had already explained several times before), then passed me through two higher levels of supervisor, who said the problem would be taken up by a “provisioning team” at some unspecified future date.

Around this time, I heard those fateful taped words (“If you wish to make a call…”) indicating I had once again been disconnected. Because the reps were not allowed to give me their extensions (for reasons of “efficiency,” says a Comcast spokesman), I had to start the whole thing again. As the night wore on and I began tossing around the name of the company’s CEO, “Reuben” –or maybe it was “Sue,” “Marian” or “Robin”–informed me that my problem was being referred to “escalations.” This is apparently their euphemism for: Customer may be armed and dangerous.

Of course, if I wanted to pay my tormentors a visit, I would have a hard time finding them. Customer-service reps are everywhere–and nowhere. They have become the disembodied household gods of the age, reminders of our helplessness in the face even of technologies we understand. They don’t offend as much as exasperate, as if part of some cosmic conspiracy to see how much we will pay in high blood pressure for our amenities.

Customers bear a share of the blame because we’ve become addicted to speed. The modem that once seemed fast now feels interminable. But the real victims of technology are the companies themselves. Bad service in a “service economy” (80 percent of GDP) is a surefire strategy for losing money. Some consultants writing in the Harvard Business Review last year (no, not Suzy Wetlaufer) found that more than half of all efforts to improve customer relations fail, mostly because companies see it as an information-technology problem.

Wrong. As usual in corporate America, it’s not the software but the soft thinking. How often have you heard the recording “We are experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of calls”? And how rarely, asks Charles Fishman in Fast Company magazine, have you felt you were “experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of staff”?

In a new book, “Once Upon a Town,” Bob Greene writes about a railroad-station canteen in the tiny town of North Platte, Neb., where the locals fed 6 million GIs passing through during World War II. Greene argues that this was “the best America that ever was.” Maybe so. Maybe we’ve lost some old-fashioned American humanity. But I’d argue that the problem is less the people than the roles they’re asked to play by corporate America. Can’t answer the calls too easily or it might encourage the customer to seek more such human contact. Can’t fix the problem without authorization. Can’t be accountable.

Actually, you could–if you’d just take me off hold.