Last month, when millions of people listened in for eight minutes of Comcast-customer-service pain, there was more to the clip's viral power than just the Kafka-esque plight of the caller. There was also, underlying the clip's resonance, a shared, simmering resentment, not of customer service in general, but of Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, in particular.

Following that incident, the Verge's Adrianne Jeffries put out a call to Comcast employees: What in the world is going on over there?

Jeffries has now heard from and interviewed around 150 current and former Comcast employees and has been publishing round-ups of excerpts. This week, however, she has published an essay that organizes all of that raw data into a story, explaining why Comcast can't seem to get its act together and why, she concludes, the existing problems will only be exacerbated by Comcast's pending acquisition of Time Warner, the country's second biggest cable provider.

At the most basic level, Comcast's problem seems to be its size: Comcast has grown piecemeal, acquisition by acquisition, and that means that its product, services, pricing, and systems vary greatly region to region. Today it has 83,000 employees operating in some 80 different markets.