Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it’s a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that’s clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don’t even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.

Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It’s designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.

My time is just as important as theirs. I have a busted product that I paid good money for, but now, in order to get useful support I have to slog through the basics which is frustrating and useless since 99% of the time I’ve already tried everything that they’re suggesting.

I worked for Disney+ as a System Administrator and later an Engineer, we’d have servers die all the time (with thousands of servers, we’d easily have 10-20 support tickets open at a time) that would need to be replaced. We pay for top tier support and get stupid suggestions from them like “did you try and clear the CMOS?”, “Try and flash this new firmware” even though nothing changed hardware wise in years and it was working fine for years, “try this and send us logs”, etc… This type of shit costs businesses a lot of money in downtime. It’s a disservice to the customer to not support them at the level that they require. In the end the product would just end up being RMA’d after a week or two of back and forth.

If you went to a doctor for a problem and they suggested all the things you already tried, and then sent you home, would you be happy?