I've gotten a steady stream of such laments in my e-mail and in my online chats. And yet DSL customers keep signing up. Verizon says it's on track to reach 700,000 users by the end of this quarter, up from 540,000 at the end of 2000 and 87,000 a year earlier. These people can't all be wrong. It's hard to say.
Satisfied customers are less likely than unhappy ones to fire off an e-mail about their service.
But the tenor of what I hear from Verizon users actually has shifted. They seem less aggravated, if still bitter over past mistreatment. But each time I call, the level-one people always make me go through the same song and dance about what operating system I am using, whether everything is connected properly, et cetera. Using a first tier of support reps to handle the easy problems is a common, and commonly exasperating, practice in the tech business. Verizon spokesman Larry Plumb says the company is working to make this more effective.