Today was "Technical Support Hell" for me. One absolutely clueless customer calls in, wanting live support on software that, according to the license agreement, has no live support option on it. The person nearly froze when she was directed to my employer's website. After a brief conversation on 9/11, I then walked her through the website and showed her where to go to get the version of our software that includes a year of live support on it. This person here acted like she never bought anything online before. After spending 15 minutes in getting her software downloaded, I showed her how to install. She then had to place me on hold to get the info from her paging service. That was another 10 minutes right there. What the real time killer during this support call was me arguing computer hardware with her. During the remainder of the call, she insisted that all of her hardware was working just fine and everything was connected properly. That was obviously a farce because she wouldn't be calling in if everything was working. What was worse was that I had to explain just about every piece of hardware and cabling to her and how it should be connected or how it works. Word of advice: Don't tell me "which phone line?" your computer should be dialing out on.
To cut this long story short, what caused this tech support nightmare was operator error. The customer apparently moved her computer and the RJ-11 cable came loose in the modem port. What she couldn't figure out in a 90-minute call to me she had to call a technician out and he fixed the problem in 2 minutes. I specifically told her that the line may not be connected properly, but she wasn't listening to any of my solutions. To me, this was the biggest waste of my time, and the biggest waste of her $19 USD.