an old teacher friend of mine used to make the naughty kids spend the rest of the lesson with their nose pressed hard on the blackboard (that dates it a bit - none of that namby pamby white board stuff....)
Nett effect - kid's nose would be glowing red for a couple of hours = everyone knew who had been naughty in Miss X's class....
My current personal bette-noir is BT - too long a time on the phone trying to get our home broadband back up to speed (from <3 kbps - no, not a typo...)
Piece-de-resistance, speak to them to say I'm cancelling the service as there were no improvements...
Little angel on the other end asked me to log on to site xyz and order a gadget that would 'speed things up', free, but postage would be £1.50....
Oh, how I laughed as I explained to her the irony of her asking me to log on to something when I had next to no broadband function, and that I was being asked to pay to receive the gadget needed to fix their technical issue...