Bad Companies - When Do You Fire Them?

I drop in at the local pub for some dinner and a beer. 3 minutes go by with no service.

7 minutes go by with no service. I'm now getting a bit frustrated.

10 minutes go by with no service. At this point it becomes clear the service at this particular establishment on this particular evening is exceptionally poor.

I'll take a moment to name names. These are all places in Seattle Washington. I've experienced serious issues with service at the Blue Star, the Barking Dog and Collin's Pub.

They all have great beer selections, but lame service.

The Barking Dog is, "on probation" while, the Blue Star and Collin's Pub are blacklisted. I have no intention of giving them my money again.

But, to get more philosophical, when on a particular occasion do you give up? After 12 minutes of not getting served, surely the odds fall into your favor of getting served in the next 3 minutes. Even then, if you were to abandon the existing establishment for someplace else, you'd clearly be behind in the game. Right?

I've asked myself these questions countless times. More recently I've been dealing with another Seattle area company which has service issues. Their game is web hosting. Let's call them "Badhost."

They seem to screw things up whenever given a chance. An earlier sign of problems was that they refused to disable a malfunctioning spam solution that was blocking wanted business emails. I won't go into further detail, but the issues have been countless. I'm not supposed to work my "day job" tomorrow, but I'm going to have to in order to deal with further screw ups on their part.

To a certain extent it's been my call to terminate their services. I've chosen not to in the face of the large scale effort required to migrate to a competitor. Even then, there's no assurance that the competitor would provide superior service.

Someplace out there, there's a mathematical equation to that answers these questions.

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