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Attempting to access the keyboard in order to physically unmute the mute button for the HR director in a live conference spanning five continents, while being yelled at and called "incompetent" for "not knowing how to do my work", in front of the entire board of directors, by the HR director, was probably the longest goddamn minute, can confirm.

Whenever I’m in the middle of something and I get a message from someone high up on the org chart.

“Hey, got a moment for a quick question?”

Me, internally: ‘Ah, fuck.’
Externally: “Yeah, totally!”

Well I still do sometimes but I am a very slow learner. In my defense, I've only been in the field for 20+ years.

When I worked phone support I'd say about 50% of incoming calls were easily identifiable as quick tickets, cuz I knew I wouldn't have the access, tools, knowledge, or some combination to deal with it. Just document and escalate. Hell those were quicker than the supposedly quick and easy password resets. Thinking I'd actually figure something out or getting roped into remoting in because they don't want to wait for someone is where problems would arise.

And than the other joins the call and asks the client, again, to click on the basic option and run the basic command. What you just asked them to do. Like you're some moron who would forget to do a basic check. And than it turns out that you are a moron who forgot to do a basic check.

100%. I've done IT support. If I've called you, you either have access I don't to solve my problem or this ticket is gonna take a week to resolve.

Same, they're like puzzles.

90% of the time I put in a ticket, it's just Microsoft being shit

it annoys me too, but I have come up with a few stumpers for our IT company. even once got to sit in on a call of two guys from our IT team and two engineers from the service's team as they tried to figure out what was going on. and there's me not understanding networking at all just laughing my ass off listening to them discuss what might be the problem

As users, we fucking hate you too.

I secretly broke it real bad so we could spend the day together! :3

if it were simple, I wouldn't have made a ticket, I'd have fixed it myself

In German theres the concept of the "DAU" which means (translated) "The dumbest possible User". It does not matter if an edgecase isn't supposed to happen, but you still have to account for it, since somehow a user will get it to produce this edgecase and break everything.

End users are the great equalizer. Their unpredictability and destruction grows equal with the amount of foolproofing you apply

Good that you know the basic checks.

Doesn't change the fact that you might have missed one, so lets still go over them all. Otherwise the ticket might go on much longer than it should.

Relevant XKCD.

But 95% of people that call support don't know that stuff. And those things solve 95% of the problems that users have. And support staff have been told to go through the script or get fired. So just be nice to them, get to the end of Level1's script AQAP then you'll get someone that's allowed to use their noggin, considerably more quickly than if you piss around.