Hmm. Well, as a former TS rep, I gotta give my two cents worth. ;)

I HATE how these guys all think the customer is dumb as hell. -- Sad to say, most of the time the customer IS dumb as Hell. When you are a halfway tech savvy person (and by that I mean you understand passwords, you know that websites are not owned and operated by your ISP, you don't click on every ad that claims your machine is infected with viruses, etc.), it's easy to forget that most of the world still doesn't do anything with their connection but get e-mail. PERIOD. (You wouldn't believe how many people I had who would call and cancel their service, then get upset that they couldn't get their e-mail.)

When you spend all day taking calls like this, 80/100/120 calls a day, and the phone queue is backed up another 150, so that every person has to stop and whine about the wait (which makes everyone else wait MORE), and you are explaining the same basic things again and again and again to people that either cannot or will not get it, all while being told what an asshole you are for not being able to just magically fix whatever their issue is (even when it has nothing to do with you)...well, I could go on, but let's just say that it's a REALLY soul-sucking job.

They get frustrated because you don't really know what you are talking about, and what you refer to one way may be something different to them. They don't get all the info they need unless they ask a million questions, which then gets them angry remarks about how long it's taking, etc. They are tired, beat, annoyed, and one more person getting upset with them doesn't make them want to be any more patient than you would be. You get frustrated because you don't feel like they are helping you, so you start madly clicking on things, which either might fix it or might make it worse. If it's fixed, you feel like they were worthless; if it gets worse, you blame them.

Does TS "suck ass", as [a previous commenter] suggests? With all this going on, and add to the fact that you spend every day waiting for your managers to tell you you are out of a job because they are moving the whole complex to India where they can pay workers a fraction of what they pay you, how good do you feel? When 80-90% of the people you speak to treat you like little better than a flunkie, where is your motivation to be nice? When every time you say hello, someone is pissed off and taking it out on you, how hard do you really wanna work to fix it?

Tech support is like any profession. Some practitioners are excellent, some are hideous, and the balance are just there, the midline. And, let me tell you, those excellent ones are hard to find, because companies don't like them. Why? Because if that one gives something extra, then customers expect it from everyone. I was actually told, point blank, not to do something that helped my calls go faster, smoother, and easier, because others weren't doing it. The company told me to stop being better (and we're talking about one of the big three ISPs, here, not some little dinky office). For the record, that whole call center is now closed, and the department is in India. Yes, really.

Wow, this got COMPLETELY out of hand. My apologies. All I'm saying is to try and understand just what you are up against, and cut them some slack. You had a bad call. He's got a bad JOB. Yes, he could have handled that better. So could you.