I'm curious...especially since I've been dealing with some crappy support from HP and Seagate lately....how may of you end up fixing issues on your own without support because you know more than the support staff you're calling? The longer that I stay in this profession (only 6 years thus far but enough it would seem...) the more that I see this. For instance I've worked with three different support agents for HP in the last 3 days regarding a paper jam issue that I just can't fix. They all ask the exact same questions every time I start even though they have multiple case ID's and plenty of background information. I've managed to piss away an hour of my afternoon working with the same individual and they are still stuck on the same troubleshooting path as the others in the previous days even though I replaced worn out parts with parts they sent out to replace them. 
That's not to say that all companies have bad support. I personally really like IBM support and even though Cisco support is in India they are still damned smart. In any case I was curious how big of an issue it was with everyone since all I'm doing right now is alternating tabs in Firefox between this site and an HP support chat session...

That's not to say that all companies have bad support. I personally really like IBM support and even though Cisco support is in India they are still damned smart. In any case I was curious how big of an issue it was with everyone since all I'm doing right now is alternating tabs in Firefox between this site and an HP support chat session...
