Yes the ones that think they know - press this button once - hearing down the receiver beep beep beep beep - you pressed some other buttons? Yes. OK - we just need to go back a few steps now.

Agreed - and thought I would add a little anecdotal evidence. I have found some professions require more assistance than others - the one I find most interesting is how often nurses have difficulty with simple tasks - my belief is there job is in some ways a life and death roller coaster and loading toner in the machine correctly is low on their radar. By the way I think very highly of nurses - salt of the earth and all that. Unsurprisingly lawyers are the rudest as a rule and quite often have difficult with simple things also - I aint making any excuses for them.

You bet - get them involved - explain it any way you can - give full tech acronyms and jargon - or dumb it way down to "its the button on the right at the top of the mouse" - describe simple shapes and positions - use analogies. The downside - you end up with a host of clients that only want to speak to you.

Yes I have reached the low point and have asked clients to either make a complaint or hang up as they are not telling me anything I have not heard a lot of times before ( I have done approx 80k cases for the copier/printer/fax/scanner company I work for - I've been here for a long time). Of course I phrase it a lot nicer than that. Interestingly in almost all cases a complaint does not help. Certainly with our major clients the people that do the buying and the users are so separated that poor service standards are not reported back to those who sign the cheque. With smaller clients they can complain all they want - the PHBs sometimes give in sometimes not - it does seem the noisier the client the more attention they get - if they are real lucky I am directed to sort it:-) Heading even further OT - one complaint I raised for a client was the crap user manual. The manager calls me and asks me what it was about so I explained the specific example the client raised was quick dial programming - ( this was of course clearly explained in the case notes ) . I suggested she attempt to program one her self as that was the same model as the one in her office - she was too busy ( she told me )to do that - but the client received a nice official letter apologising thanking input blah .

Not religious myself either - but you are right about weird - it all comes down to faith. One little philosophical game a played the other night led me to conclude that Christians are all agnostic because they can never know the truth and have to make a leap of faith to believe in god - they are , therefore , agnostic because they have 'no knowledge ' only faith. I am an agnostic aetheist beccause i dont know god exists ( who could ) but i believe it likely he does not.