Originally Posted by PaulR
On the third day I got through to someone (a Geordie) who started off with the standard spiel but who listened when I interrupted saying "I've done all that three times before" - and said "fair enough we'll dispense with all of that crap then"
Love it! It's unfortunate that not all the staff are like that, but most of them are robots who are just reading from a script and actually don't have any IT experience.
I used to manage the helpdesk for Philips DAP (shavers, irons, kettles etc) and I made sure that everyone on the desk had actually handled these products so they knew what they were talking about. It's no good repeatedly asking someone for a batch number if you don't know where it is yourself, but if you can say "look by the spindle on the right it begins with a 9, just give the cluster frame a tug, sometimes they can be a pain to get off" it makes everyone's lives easier.
Moral of the story? Employee people who know what they're talking about, or train them up. Obvious? You'd think.