No. 99.9% of the time, the people you get on the phone are courteous and helpful. Comcast is notorious for poor service precisely because it is not the norm. Sanity check: if this happened to everybody all the time, why would it be making the rounds on the internet? Anything that is newsworthy is rare by definition.
Maybe 9 out of 10 calls to customer service are hassle free for me. In addition to which company, the type of issue you are trying to resolve also matters greatly, for example calls concerning payments/billing and cancellation are much more likely to be contentious.
One kind of customer service problem is low-level abuse, for which a particular rep is likely mostly responsible, usually passive-aggressive behavior like putting calls on hold then disconnecting, endless call-transferring, etc. rather than outright lies or verbal abuse.
The other kind which is more subtle involves higher-level systemic dysfunction and neglect: using call centers or neutered in-house support following very strict scripts / with limited means to resolve all but the most basic issues, active support issues / tickets needing attention yet ignored and unresolved for months at a time, per-call wait times of half an hour or longer, fully-automated systems not even giving the option to speak to a live representative.
Occasionally some of the more outrageous instances of problems of the first kind are deemed newsworthy and given media attention, especially when caught on tape.
Problems of the second kind rarely get any sort of media attention at all, no matter how severe. Companies will suffer customer-service-specific reputation damage for systemic problems (Google for example), but never make headlines for it.
Large companies can also be quite savvy when it comes to pr and the media. Higher tier customers, top-plan-holders often have their support issues promoted internally and expedited to an amazing extent, creating plenty of good publicity to drown out any perceptible, notable criticism.
Although Comcast is notorious for having terrible customer service, this is NOT the only fee-for-service business that deals with disconnects like this that I have dealt with.
It seems to be a trend now to harangue customers when they want to terminate service contracts.
I wouldn't be surprised if certain companies pay retention bonuses if they can keep a 'disconnect call' from actually disconnecting.
