I used to work tech support. Those lines are there because they work. In only 9 months, I had a few different people tell me they were pc repair techs and knew what they were doing, and I didn't need to do the basics.

I did them anyhow because the company said so, and I found that more often than not, it fixed the problem.

If I had sent that to second-level support without making sure of it, I'd have been written up.

So yes, they're trained to treat callers like they don't know what they're doing, because they often don't. Even if they claim to.

The best thing you can do is just go along with it quickly and get it over with, even if you've already done it. There's no way around it.

I ran an enterprise help desk for a few years. I wasnt in the day to day, but would listen to calls sometimes. The reality is, dumb 5 year olds are often smarter.

We had a large (250k) workforce with a pretty wide variance in roles. We had probably about 100 people in the call center, although some of them did more interesting stuff too. It was a very good support organization with multichannel contact capabilities and really good, well paid staff.

Basically there was a barbell distribution with the lowest ranked people and highest ranked employees being the worst. (Think attorneys and other special IC and middle managers. Executives had dedicated support and didn’t use this method.) The most expensive 20% of users make 80% of the calls. The high ranking ones were dumber to deal with and took more time, the low ranking ones called too often for dumb reasons but resolved quickly.

I cannot imagine the hell on earth the general public could be.

There is no breaking through it because those LLM replies are not tweaked for 5 year olds due to managerial decree, they're tweaked for the average callers to those support departments due to cold hard reality.

If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier.

Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.

I was a programmer at a small company that had their programmers field tech support calls and there is a good reason they do this... most of the people calling in are dumb as rocks when it comes to whatever they needed help with... some called while driving for help that required you to be in front of a computer.

> I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old.

That's quite reasonable on their part.

I do wish I could take a quiz to bypass it, though.

Have you tried saying "shibboleet"?

At most places, 95% of the customers are dumb as rocks. And 95% of the support staff is also dumb as rocks. So they're conditioned to assume everyone calling in is an idiot, and it's very likely that whoever you're talking to is not equipped to understand what you're saying to try to convince them that you're not.

My favorite instance of this was with an ISP that rhymes with Bombast where it was very clear that the modem wasn't getting a signal. The lights indicated it, and I was also able to connect to the modem's internal monitoring and see that it wasn't seeing anything on the line. The support agent kept asking me to reboot my computer.

People suicided because of that, and the UK post office knew fully well it was their own fault.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal