Last year, I had a 3 month contract for a company that had some PPC campaigns running. My old boss linked my private Google account with theirs so I could work on their campaign. For ages, I could still see their site in Google Analytics, but it didn't really bother me.
I opened an Adsense account with my private Google account address this October and was toying with the idea of running an Adwords campaign too. I logged into Adwords but it still seemed to be linked to my old Boss' account, so I emailed him and asked him to unlink us.
He did. Unfortunately, since then it seems Google thinks I no longer have an Adsense account linked to my Google account either.

I've spent weeks exchanging emails with Google's worse than useless excuse for customer service robots and the best thing they can tell me is that I should contact my old boss and have him give me his password so I can login to the account. I've already explained 5 times why that is never going to happen, but I just get the same thing sent to me again and again.

They won't even tell me whether signing up again for a new account would sort this out (the amount of time and hassle it takes to get an answer out of them is already worth more than the money I made) or whether I'd just end up giving more money to my old boss.

Has anyone else had this happen to them?

What do I do, apart from pull my hair out?