Telemarketing (outbound sales or inbound sales or support) is the standard I-don't-want-to-bag-groceries job for kids and young adults in a lot of midwest cities, and I did my time. The truth of this is not to be underestimated. It varies from company to company (and number to number within a company), but very often the call center employees are given rigid, obsolete support systems, scripts, and no latitude to do anything to help. In fact, it's also common for the care reps to not be employed by the company you're intending to call for support, rather a telemarketing firm that specializes in grinding out phone calls. I worked for one agency, representing three or four big name companies (names anyone in tech would recognize) and I don't think I ever met an employee of the companies we were representing.
I also don't get too wound up about international support for this reason. If these companies wouldn't give any power to people three states away with no language barrier (upstream or downstream) there's no reason whatsoever to expect that a company has given someone in another hemisphere the ability to flex in any way at all.
Actually, rethinking that, is there a company right now doing phone support the "right way?" Might be lucrative.
If someone was really passionate about this it might be possible to fix it in one large company and use that as a halo case to sell their services to additional companies.
Slicehost too, but I don't think they do phone support.
[edit] Might as well relate an anecdote:
When I got my MacBook Pro about 2 years ago I had it built with some custom options (glossy screen and bigger HDD, FYI), which made it a "custom order" in Apple's system. It took a little longer to ship, but anyways.
So over Xmas the MBP bit the dust, and I had to get a replacement from Apple. They offered up a new unibody MacBook Pro, and since the stock model matched the specs on my custom-built one, I was to get a stock, new, MBP.
This was going to take about a week, they told me. I had an Apple Store some 20 minutes away from my home, and I asked if I could just bring in my broken laptop and walk home with a new one. Less hassle for everyone. Nope. According to my support rep, this is allowed if my machine was a standard config to begin with, but their system would not allow a replacement order to be placed if the system was custom!
Rules sometimes suck.
Ideally their script should have an exception or a way to bump to a supervisor who has the ability to make decisions themselves.
A more personal example: AT&T won't sell me FTTN DSL service, which they offer in my neighborhood and in fact push aggressively, because I have "conflicting" DSL service. I'm happy to cancel my old service, but they won't schedule an install date (3+ weeks out) until I've actually canceled it; their order entry screens won't even enable the "Next" button until they've verified that I have. Dumb rule!
Probably, every time you see some crazy customer service story like this, the culprit is an ill-considered rule pushed down on service staff.