Mona Shaw, the senior citizen in question, took issue with Comcast’s languid installation of her Triple Play service (TV, phone and Internet). After going through the usual customer service channels by phone, Mona paid a visit to her local Comcast call center office in Manassas, Va., on a Friday afternoon in August. She and her husband wanted to speak to a manager. They were asked to wait outside, which they did … for more than two hours. Then, they were told that the manager had left for the day.

Mona Shaw spent the weekend simmering over the insult. On Monday, she returned with said hammer. She smashed the keyboard of the CSR who had ignored her. She demolished the telephone and then eviscerated the computer monitor before the cops showed up and relieved her of her hammer.

“I scared the tar out of some people, at least. It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset,” Mona told The Washington Post. “After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ‘Now do I have your attention?’ ”

Mona received a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor, thankfully), a $345 fine and is barred from paying any visits to the Comcast office for a year. A Comcast spokeswoman called the incident “truly a unique and inappropriate situation” and, while not revealing Mona’s service record, indicated that the company’s service records did not match Mona’s account of its services.