I hate it too but they don't because everyone claims they know what they're doing and they've already tried all that stuff.

99% of the time it turns out they haven't and that was the problem.

That's the difference from a good support tech and a bad one tbh. Bring able to gauge someone's tech literacy and taking in all troubleshooting done before is literally the first thing you should do. So many escalations I've received just has "had user reboot, had them disconnect and reconnect to network. Checked and device has no pending updates, sending to L3." in the notes. Half of the time a reboot really wouldn't do anything, and they really just needed to be added to an AD group (most of my tickets last week). I'm just glad I'm shifting out of support and more into projects.

Honestly, they can't. The way IT works is there's multiple levels. First level, second level, third level. Whenever anybody calls in, they get first level, which are usually either inexperienced people, new people, or people with no experience whatsoever, and they're all reading scripts. They're the gatekeepers for level 2, 3, and 4, the people who actually know what they're doing. It's because 99 out of 100 people don't know shit and it just needs to be restarted and they would clog up the time of people who actually know what they're doing and nothing would ever get done.

And if one of those level one guys accidentally lets through somebody who should have been taken care of by their script, they will get reamed the fuck out for wasting people's time who gets paid more an hour than they do a day.

If I was support, had a list to work through because my calls were monitored and recorded, and you were being a complete know-it-all asshole, I would walk through them as slow as possible, and repeat as many as I could plausibly get away with.

Because that's the actual job: following instructions from their boss, which means following their processes. Why would they deviate from that, and risk their job, for someone who's rude, and/or self-important?

As someone who's also technically competent and rarely calls support, when I do, I've never had to repeat the same steps 17 times, or even 3 times.

I let them tell me to turn off and on again, confirm it's done, explain why I need a level 2 support or escalation. Then they'll typically ask me one or two more questions, which I'll politely answer, reiterate my polite request for level 2, and they will escalate for me.