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I'm convinced that dealing with the majority of free front line technical support nowadays is an exercise in frustration. This frustration ranges from minor annoyance caused by a tech support agent's (TSA) lack of training, to F-word flying fists of fury triggered by almost comical "interactions" befitting an Abbott and Costello sketch gone wrong. But no one's laughing.

Technical support is increasingly seen as a vital component in technology-based products -- from MP3 players to corporate collaboration suites. Consumers expect it, but are companies making a real effort to meet these expectations?

I have the luxury of being able to figure out and fix many problems myself because I'm in the IT field, but there are times when tech support is unavoidable. And when that happens, patience can be tested to extremes.

The best way to illustrate my point is to share my two favorite tech support run-ins:

Episode 1: Are You Talking To Me?

While evaluating a Web-based collaboration suite I noticed a glitch with the tool's instant messenger (IM) feature. Although users are given the ability to create custom availability status messages such as "I'll be back in five minutes" or "Can't chat right now", the software seemed only to display its stock messages regardless of what custom messages were set. I wrote a brief and to the point e-mail to the company's tech support explaining the issue and asked whether this was a known problem.

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I received a reply several days later with a set of instructions on how to turn off the little IM avatars you see during a chat session (strike one). That's odd, I thought, I never mentioned anything about avatars. I didn't even allude to anything related to them. Was it a mix-up? Was the TSA actually responding to another user's question? OK, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's try this again.

I figured the best thing to do is to keep things as simple as possible and not to write a long-winded response. Over-explaining might confuse the issue -- or the TSA. Leaving the entire message thread intact, I simply stated that the response had nothing to do with my problem and requested they re-read my original question. Several days later another TSA asked me to forward information about the contents of my Sent Mail folder (strike two).

I responded again, stating my problem was related to the IM custom status messages -- not avatars, not e-mail. I received a third reply from a third TSA explaining what IM is and how it differs from e-mail (strike three, you're out).

Episode 2: Round and Round We Go

Before settling on my current anti-virus/anti-spyware suite, I evaluated a slew of products, one of which required ActiveX and the IE browser in order to run manual updates of its definition files. Since I set Firefox as my default browser, this anti-virus/anti-spyware suite automatically installed some sort of ActiveX plug-in to Firefox. I was not a happy camper, so I contacted the software company's front line tech support via their Web site's chat feature.

The following chat dialog has not been embellished:

TSA: How may I help you today?

Me: When I ran a manual update, your software seemed to have installed some sort of ActiveX plug-in to Firefox. Can you please tell me how to uninstall it?

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