> I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens

That is a hell of generous description for a person who sits in your Slack instance and responds with "I have escalated to the team internally and am waiting to hear back on confirmation if this is an issue."

Moving a Level 1 support engineer closer to the customer doesn't give them more information, it just reduces the latency to getting a non-answer.