Also remember telstra staff (not actually telstra but outsourced) and given cash incentives to get you off the phone ASAP.
this was alot easier back in the dial up days, please test that fix, oh only one phone line ok will need to hang up and test and call us back if the problem still exists.
So back when I was bigpond help desk, we were outsourced to a company called teletech. Teletechs contract was based on a certain $ per answered call (notice a conflict of interest yet) so we are phone reps would get a bonus each month if we kept calls under a certain average was circa 5-6 min at the time. So our interest was in getting you the phone not fixing your issue.
lets say there 3 things that could cause a problem (back in the dial up days was TCP stack, modem init string or drivers) we would do 1 then get you off the line not all three and have a 99% chance always start with the tcp stack as quickest next caller would do init string then 3rd poor bastard would get modem drivers.
we could never admit to an outage either there could be unscheduled maintenance but not an outage.
In one case the log in database was down, we knew it was going to be circa 2 days to fix. we were told to tell them try again in a couple hours, telstra would get some more phone calls then they would call us again and teletech got another $$ for the same thing.
there a reason that the average employee only lasted 6 months was depressing offensive work where we would be abused by callers......and probably deserved it.