Why you should be nice to tech support agents on the phone:

This guy calls in with an intermittent connection. He's connecting through a router and refuses to do any troubleshooting whatsoever and is extremely condescending and nasty to me when I ask him to, like I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. He demands I schedule a tech to fix it, and I initially refuse, but he insists. He's trying to bully me into doing what he says. Now, he needs to remember that his intimidation factor is grossly diminished by distance. So I go ahead, and because he's such an asshole to me, I push it back deliberately to monday, rather than first available, tomorrow. He's not happy about that, and wants to talk to my supervisor because he says his contract says he gets a tech out within 24 hours. Now, that 24 hours is only the promise if the modem is hard down, no block synch, and proper troubleshooting has been performed. He disagrees. My supervisor doesn't want to talk to him, so I tell him there's no supervisor available to take his call. He calls me a liar. I could care less what someone like him thinks of me. he eventually hangs up, and since I wasn't able to confirm the appointment time, I did not schedule the tech at all. And the supervisor is cheering me on.