When a company drags you through hell and treats you like crap for weeks on end, leaving you on hold for hours only to hang up on you again and again, there's usually little you can do. DirecTV takes orders from end customers online and over the phone here in LA, but they contract out installations to a variety of random local installers, meaning they have no control over the customer experience once they've taken you order over the phone.

I won't recap all they trials and tribulations they've put me through. Their customer service is obscenely terrible. Suffice it to say I placed an order for service in mid September and it will be a miracle if I get service installed by the time Halloween rolls around. A month and a half to put up a satellite dish. I wish I was joking, but it is just that absurd. I've rarely ever dealt with a less caring company.

What can a beaten down customer do? You can withhold your business. You can file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. You can yell at various people over the phone. I've done all of that. But in this day and age, the Internet provides a more powerful way to get back at them. I can share my mistreatment with the world and reach thousands of people online, and perhaps the next time one of them is deciding between DirecTV and an alternative, like cable, they'll kick DirecTV to the curb.

Some companies don't realize how quickly bad news travels in this day and age. The internet gives every customer a megaphone, and as you can climb the tree of Google search results, that megaphone grows louder.