Tech support workers of the world, unite!

Tech support is not your live manual. We publish extensive documentation for our product, easily available online.
Tech support is for people who have problems that the manuals don’t cover — or I suppose for those who are so new to the product that they simply don’t understand what the manual is telling them. Many of the people I’m talking about, though, are longtime customers who ought to have figured this stuff out long ago. On the other hand, some are recent purchasers who haven’t bothered to crack a manual since they ran the installer and fired up the program, because it’s easier to ask support how to do it or how to fix it.
My advice to y’all: Try reading the documentation and actually learning something about your hardware, operating system, and the software that runs on it instead of parasiting on the experts who have better things to do.
I’m convinced (and I believe I’ve said so before) that, on average, the general knowledge possessed by “systems analysis” geeks today has plummetted to new lows as compared to just 15 years ago. Hell, I don’t have a degree in computing technology or computer science, but I know more about more operating systems running on more hardware than most of these baby geeks have ever even heard of, let alone worked with. God help us, these people will be running the computer systems we’ll depend on when we’re old…it scares the hell out of me sometimes. And the sheer cost to the companies they work for in all the lost time and motion while they — or, rather, we — figure these problems out must be astronomical. Yet somehow they manage to protect their phoney-baloney jobs for months and years. (As I write this, I am thinking of a specific “tech” at a very large and prominent US data-processing company who has survived more consolidations and RIFs than anyone as dumb as s/he is should ever have had the right to expect.)
Sadly, a lot of these people have gotten Peter-Principled into their positions by virtue not of their abilities, but because of the local hiring policies that smile on promoting people within departments because they’re already sitting there rather than actually making promotions based on merit and ability. Perfect examples are found in university data centers all over the world where the progression is “student worker paid next to nothing to check people in and out of computer center and play computer games all day, graduates and takes a better-paid job when student worker supervisor retires or is promoted, then continues to promote up the line until voila, he’s in charge of Computing Services, and doesn’t actually know any more than he did when he was a student worker.” And the entire time the hiring system is gamed — “I have to post the job university-wide because of our employment policies, but we’ve written the job requirements so that only you fit all of them, so don’t worry, the job is yours.”
I know people that happened to. Hell, it happened to me once when I was in grad school (but not in a tech job).
I probably shouldn’t post this but I’ve about reached the breaking point with these morons. (I did remove a specific reference to the specific customer who prompted this posting, though, before I hit “publish”.)