I've had similar experiences with the phone company, especially since I won't subscribe to their extremely high service fee to cover the house wiring. Any time I report a problem, the cause they diagnose would be the house, until I got wise and started making my calls to them from a phone plugged into the box at the outside connection. Actually got a rep to exclaim how noisy it was then. Back in the days of dial up would lose the connection completely.

Much happier now that we moved to a developement with buried wiring, problems now tend to be all or none.