Power to the people! Creative consumers have found plenty of ways to get some personal attention from faceless corporations. No longer content to sit back and abide by the whims of fate (or customer service), empowered consumers have been on a rampage this month; let's take a look.

First up is California's Dennis Sheehan, who received a Gateway desktop computer with a monitor malfunction. Because the monitor did not properly display graphics, Sheehan says that he was never presented with Gateway's onscreen EULA that shows up on first boot. That agreement says customer problems won't be handled by the court system but by arbitration.

Sheehan, who wanted no part of arbitrating, took the matter to a local small claims court—no lawyers allowed. Sheehan convinced the judge that he had not accepted Gateway's agreement, even though Gateway insisted that a paper version also came in the box. The case is a murky one—Gateway claims to have sent Sheehan an entirely new computer which he denies receiving—but Sheehan seems pleased to have at least gotten Gateway's attention.

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, also found itself on the losing end of an arbitration battle when a judge ruled that the company could not enforce the arbitration portion of its "clickwrap" agreement. Cases like these could well change the way that tech companies try to impose arbitration on consumers; the EULA "arbitration only" clause is a popular choice but may be unenforceable.

A New Jersey resident also used small claims court to solve his own computer problem. Pat Dori sued Dell after the company lost his laptop, which had been sent in for repairs. But here's the twist: instead of serving the papers to Dell's corporate headquarters, Dori had them served to a local Dell mall kiosk. The predictable upshot was that when Dori showed up to court, he was unopposed. Being unopposed, he won a default judgment against Dell. The company, which initially planned to appeal, has now agreed to just cut its losses and move on.

For those unwilling or uninterested in the hassle of filing a lawsuit (and in contributing to the culture of litigation here in the US), calling the CEO is another popular option. The Consumerist has, among many recent stories on the topic, just published one person's account of going straight to the top. A call to the DirecTV CEO's office got a problem taken care of far more effectively than calls to tech support ever had.

Had your own tech problems solved in a creative way? Share the solutions in the discussion thread.