My experience is with smallish companies, so
my perspective is slightly different from your large company or in-house
support staff. All the previous still applies, but keep in
mind:
- If you call late Saturday night, but you get the answering machine, and you call back on Sunday morning, and still you get the answering machine, and you call back yet again that afternoon, and STILL no one has answered your MAJOR PROBLEM with mistyping your e-mail password, chances are that the answering machine is not eating your messages, but everyone has, in fact, gone home for the weekend. Please wait until a reasonable hour Monday morning before leaving a fifth message on the machine. We can't afford to pay someone to sit by the phone at 3 A.M. every time you call.
- Don't click ahead. Despite the fact that you can only get 26.4 over that tin can and string you call a telephone line, I can hear you clicking that mouse much, much faster than I told you to. If you really are "a computer dummy" like you told me, and if you really need me to "say things in normal language, not 1's and 0's," then please, please, please wait for me to tell you what to do with that dialog box (sorry, rectangle on the screen thingy) before zipping through four rather important setup screens.