I used to work for Dell and other software companies in Tech Support.  It’s not all that easy, and for the most part we’re not “reading from a screen”.

Most everyone reading this has had to make that dreaded phone call to Tech Support for something.  The key to understanding how to get the best experience from Tech Support is to understand where you’re calling and why they do the things they do.  Here are some things to remember.

1. Some things they have to do: It’s frustrating, but there’s good reason.  Why do they ask you the exact same questions every time?  Well, for one thing, those questions are specifically designed to diagnose and resolve a huge majority of problems.  I don’t have the numbers, but those first 10 questions or so I would estimate to resolve 80-90% of problems.  Saying “I’ve already been through this with the last guy” means nothing to the absolutely new-to-the-situation representative.  They go through this process with you to make sure that all the bases have been covered – not because they’re brainless.
2. At times, it may feel like they’re detached and not paying attention.  They may be detached but they’re paying attention.  Tech Support is a lot like chess – you’ve got to be thinking several moves ahead, and you’ve got to try the most logical approach.  If your mouse doesn’t work, they may have to simultaneously teach you to navigate your computer using only the keyboard for the first time ever and then start ranking the cause of the malfunction in order of most likely to least likely, then find support documentation so that they make sure that they don’t miss a very important detail.  Computers are essentially a large group of interconnected complex systems – there area million things that can go wrong even during a repair.
3. Your computer really does need to be restarted.  A restart causes all of the system processes to come online again, and hopefully if one isn’t working you can find out during that reboot process.  At any time your computer can be running a hundred processes that you don’t know about.  As I type this, there are 58 processes running on my computer, and the only programs I have running is Firefox and iTunes.  If you visualize all of those processes as little red or green lights (green means good) then a restart lets you see which ones start red and fix the issue.
4. They may have to try 4 or 5 solutions.  Just because they don’t get it right the first two times doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re doing, it means they haven’t found the solution yet.  Like I mentioned, techs have to establish the most plausible reason for the problem, then the next and the next and so on.
5. A supervisor is going to go through the same steps with you.  There is usually 1 supervisor for every ten to twelve techs (in most places I work) and they do a lot more than just take angry phone calls.

The most important thing to remember is that this is a real person with real feelings.  This is not some dippy high school student.  This is a trained tech being paid to listen to people yell at him all day, and he or she didn’t cause the problem on your computer.  The problem was probably caused by incorrect (or completely lacking) maintenance or letting someone download something stupid.