I work in very close proximity to three separate company helpdesks and it strikes me as ironic that while all three can answer near as damn it 100% of our customer queries either on the phone or within an hour of hanging up, our parent company’s IT helpdesk is much more comfortable hiring people who only know how to refer calls to other teams who can actually answer the calls while they remain blissful in their seeming ignorance. I challenged the helpdesk manager about this while querying why one of his team members had never heard of spyware before and got the ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ reply. ‘How many cooks are too many’, I wondered before fixing the problem myself.

Who else out there is more than a little concerned when it appears that the technical customer service helpdesk knows less about basic technology than you?