Dell customer service lies, don't buy a Dell.

[ssampier]

I've worked plenty of tech support jobs, both as phone support (*twitch*) and as a hardware jockey.

There is one universal truth about 'bad service'....Even if it only happens 1/10 of 1% of the time, it HAS to happen to SOMEONE. And of those people, a few of them are going to feel like they were singled out.

And even if the numbers show that a company has 3x the problems of the industry average, there will be people in the company, or customers, who have never even caught a whiff of problems and will vehemently deny that there is anything wrong.

Right you are. I currently work phone support (*twitches*), I have been tempted not tell my customers anything--unless they need to know. Usually I will admit something casually, "yes we were down 15 minutes on Sunday." Then the customer will launch into a spiel about how they were down for 3 weeks. Turns out their DSL bridge was unplugged the whole time.