Via Mark Berman at The Washington Post comes this painful, but all too familiar, story about a consumer who simply wanted to cancel his Comcast service. Listen to Ryan Block’s recording of the customer service call, but make sure you don’t have any sharp objects around when you do. Block says that the recording picks up 10 minutes into the call. The recording is only eight minutes long, but it’s the longest eight minutes you will spend all day, unless you find yourself floating in shark-infested waters, waiting for a rescue boat.

The key thing here is the poor consumer, Block, keeps repeating a request of Bartleby-like simplicity: “Please discontinue our Comcast service.” And the snapping turtle of a customer service (ha!) rep simply will not let him go! Berman sees the larger picture:

There is a larger issue here, one that suffuses much of our modern life: How much do we truly control in our lives? We pay companies for Internet service, for television, for phone plans, for phones, for apps, for services and for goods. Once, we paid to have a phone line and television service and gas and electricity and water; now, many (but not all) of us have ongoing contracts with companies to stream a limited library of movies and shows; we pay annual memberships so that the things we order can arrive a little bit faster. We don’t just pay for a newspaper to get dropped on our front door every day; we pay so we can access a news organization’s content online, and in exchange for that we see unusual ads targeted to our particular preferences. (This doesn’t even touch on the unpaid services, the ones that we entrust with our e-mails, our photos, our pokes, our files, our favorites, our likes and the rest of our digital lives, ready to be strip-mined for data points that can be sold to advertisers.)

You may recall that I have been in a similar place myself, with AT&T. ‘Memba this?

If Archie died strapping a suicide bomber vest on and detonating himself at Comcast world headquarters, would anyone doubt that he was a martyr? I would ululate in the town square.

(I’m joking. I do not support suicide bombing in any way, shape, or form, or any form of violence against a company. I’m being hyperbolic to make a point. Please, settle down.)