I was disappointed to learn that some companies set fucked up quotas for their customer service people. If you call to cancel, they can't just process the request: they need to try to keep you, because they have to keep a certain number of cancellers each day. And in those situations and others like it, being polite seems to come off as susceptibility. It's a system designed--it seems to me--to cause confrontation.

I think we can safely blame the corporate overlords for this situation: set impossible goals for one side of the phonecall while pissing off the customer at the other. Whatever moves that needle, no matter how it dehumanizes people, no matter how big the CEO's yacht already is.