Why is it it seems almost all people in Tech support are complete and utter morons?

I was having a read of this page which details customers chats with idiot technicians:

http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_stuptech.shtml

I reminds me of all the stupid encounters with tech support I have had over the years. Normally the first major problem I have to get them over is that I have already restarted the computer and that having them tell me to do it doesn’t make it suddenly have any greater effect. The next thing I normally need to get them over is that the issue is complicated. They always greet me with surprise when i detail the issue, half the time because it turns out they have never heard of it.

My favourite example of this was a year or so ago when I was having trouble sending emails on my mobile through Gmail. Now the fact that T-mobile advertised their mobile data plan as a nice way to get to services like Gmail suggest they should really know a thing or two about making it work.Turns out they didn’t in fact, the only way the issue got solved was by me saying it so slowly for their tech to understand i figured it out without them.

Then you have to get them over the idea that they can’t just feed you meaningless suggestions with no real connection to the problem in hand. For example, when Tiscali wanted me to change my packet size to speed the connection up. I pointed out that this would give me about a 1% speed increase and I was looking for about an 800% increase. They then agreed that maybe that wasn’t the issue and we moved on. In fact, That issue took days!

It makes me think that actually, the one part of the IT industry that is really not being fully tapped is support. Tech support people who know how to do more than just turn it off and on again, Tech support people who don’t think “Linux” is an application or that your screen is blue because of a virus. Hell, most tech support calls could be fixed in minutes if the technician actually listened to everything they were told and thought about it instead of running from a script.