I suspect there are a couple of things going on there.
One, it’s important to distinguish consulting an expert from consulting a tech support script. Most of the time when you call up tech support, you’re talking to a human being, but not an expert. You’re talking to a person whose job it is to execute a script in order to relieve the experts from dealing with the common cases.
(And yes, it’s in the interest of a consumer tech-support department to spend as little money on expensive experts as they can get away with — which is why when a Windows box has gotten laggy, they say “reboot it” and not “pop open the task manager and see what’s using 100% of your CPU”. They don’t want to diagnose the long-term problem (your Scrabble game that you left running in the background has a bug that makes it busy-wait if it’s back there for 26 hours); they want to make your computer work now and get you off the line. That’s a different case from, for instance, an institutional IT department (at, say, a university) that has to maintain a passable reputation with the faculty who actually care about getting their research done.)
Two, there’s narrative bias. The much-more-numerous cases where the simple fix works don’t make for good “horror stories”, so you don’t hear them retold. Especially the ones where the poor user is now embarrassed because they have to admit they were outguessed by a tech-support script after giving the support tech a hard time.
(Yeah, I like good tech support too; that’s part of why I use the local awesome option (Sonic.net) for my ISP instead of Comcast. I can call them up and talk to someone who actually knows what ARP means. But sometimes the problem does go away for months when you power-cycle the damn modem.)
I suspect there are a couple of things going on there.
One, it’s important to distinguish consulting an expert from consulting a tech support script. Most of the time when you call up tech support, you’re talking to a human being, but not an expert. You’re talking to a person whose job it is to execute a script in order to relieve the experts from dealing with the common cases.
(And yes, it’s in the interest of a consumer tech-support department to spend as little money on expensive experts as they can get away with — which is why when a Windows box has gotten laggy, they say “reboot it” and not “pop open the task manager and see what’s using 100% of your CPU”. They don’t want to diagnose the long-term problem (your Scrabble game that you left running in the background has a bug that makes it busy-wait if it’s back there for 26 hours); they want to make your computer work now and get you off the line. That’s a different case from, for instance, an institutional IT department (at, say, a university) that has to maintain a passable reputation with the faculty who actually care about getting their research done.)
Two, there’s narrative bias. The much-more-numerous cases where the simple fix works don’t make for good “horror stories”, so you don’t hear them retold. Especially the ones where the poor user is now embarrassed because they have to admit they were outguessed by a tech-support script after giving the support tech a hard time.
(Yeah, I like good tech support too; that’s part of why I use the local awesome option (Sonic.net) for my ISP instead of Comcast. I can call them up and talk to someone who actually knows what ARP means. But sometimes the problem does go away for months when you power-cycle the damn modem.)