Mauricio Freitas quotes Seth Godin's post on bad customer service complaints and points out "that it is part of human nature to complain when things go wrong, but you read very little when things are right." And he's correct. It's natural for us to complain when service providers fail to deliver, but it's based on reason. When things are going our way, the operators are simply doing their job, holding up their end of the commitment in exchange for the money we pay them.

Now we don't have to call up customer service thank them every time we successfully use our smartphones or PDAs to send a text, call up a contact, access the internet, etc. But we should also have more realistic expectations of quality of service (QoS). If we've always had coverage for most of the year mysteriously can't connect for a day or two, we should consider the downtime in context: 2 days out of 365 is a failure rate of around .54%! Which is what I experience with my current cellular network. The point is that some complaints about the reliability of a service tend to exaggerate.

It is proper to complain when a service is down. But we should forward the concern directly to the provider first, instead of publicly lashing out and declaring that the operator wholeheartedly sucks. There is a time for that, but only when your grievances are consistently ignored.