It's often said that while happy customers will tell three people about their good experience, unhappy customers spread the news to four times that number. In the Internet age, those figures need updating.

On June 14, Brian Finkelstein, a law student in Washington, D.C., welcomed a Comcast technician into his home, hoping that the visit would finally put an end to the connectivity problems that had plagued him for the previous two weeks. It didn't. After replacing Finkelstein's modem, the technician called his Comcast colleagues to get the equipment activated and was put on hold. Ninety minutes later, he was still on hold.

He had also fallen asleep on Finkelstein's couch. Two further appointments were missed by Comcast, and on June 20 a despairing Finkelstein decided to vent his frustration in the form of a one-minute video clip that listed Comcast's failings and showed the sleeping technician. He made the video available online. As of mid-August, it had been viewed 768,674 times. It has also been shown on MSNBC and written about by The New York Times. For its part, Comcast fired the sleepy technician. The company failed to return numerous calls for this article.