" I think all these sat companies must go to a special
school to learn how to torture their customers. "
Actually, they do. Management knows exactly how long you have to hold on the phone, and that if you have to hold too long and hang up, a certain number of customers will pay at least one more month, and so on.
There are even insurers who measure the cost of hiring phone reps to answer appeals of denials, versus the cost of random denials and the interest
income they can make by not paying claims for an extra week, or month, etc.
This is not random or uncommon, it is actually common for corporations to use "abuse" as a metric to increase their profits.