I worked for a company that was also a small ISP. If the internet service for our clients went down we were not allowed to tell them the truth. We either had to blame the upstream provider, or act like we had just heard about it and were looking into it.
I worked for a major isp in the late 90s supporting dialup, used to be queues of up to 4 hours to get through, it was heavily oversubscribed and people constantly getting busy tones when trying to connect, this wasn't a problem that was going to be fixed anytime soon.
Often you'd answer he phone and find people snoring who had fallen asleep waiting to get through, youd shout to wake them up then hang up. You also had to be creative with answrs when they did get through like giving them a code to put in front of their number when dialling in 'to bypass the queue ' by the time they'd ring in again and get through your shift was over and they were irate with someone else.