A recent audio clip of former journalist Ryan Block fighting with Comcast to cancel service has been making the rounds, reminding us of some of the challenges that happen when a company treats customer retention as more important than the customer itself.

Of course, this has been a problem for ages, going back to when the phone company had a monopoly. Back then, Lily Tomlin created a name for herself in part thanks to the character Ernestine. A clip, above, was from an SNL sketch in the late ’70s, but she had been portraying the character years before that on “Laugh-In.”

For those who have had to deal with Comcast’s retentions department, they can probably sympathize with those who had to deal with the phone company decades earlier. Big companies can easily fall into the trap of putting focus on the wrong things, from which it’s challenging to break free once employees then react accordingly.