Once is a fairly long while, I do have a duh moment. But usually I hesitate and hesitate because i'm sure I'll get some low-level CS person working from a script. The upside such as it is is that I'm (rarely) pleasantly surprised.

Somehow it feels like it's real (for some people) in experience. I've dealt with both Spectrum/TWC and Verizon FiOS support within the last couple of years and been pleasantly surprised that I could talk 'tech' with the first person I encountered and we cut right through all the troubleshooting bullshit to get things fixed.

Spectrum - we had a voice and a data cable modem (due to location and cabling requirements). Lost the phone service. Called in and the first things I offered them were the MAC addresses off both modems and which one was supposed to be which. That set off the "shit, he knows what he's doing" moment and we got both modems running correctly in less than ten minutes, including IVR and hold time.

Verizon - had a weird ticket that ended up being a NOC issue. Explained the odd backstory of events, a ticket that happened a couple days prior that I was part of a regional outage, and the Tier 1 guy had me hop on a video call to point my camera at my computer at the ONT where I basically did everything without him asking me to (cabling direct, pulling up IP status info, etc, live reboots) and he ran it by a NOC guy remotely and it ended up being a bigger ticket above me. Took an extra day of a regional outage, but that data helped them get rolling.

It's nice to read the happy path cases like yours. The bad experiences tend to stick in our memories much more, but if I'm being honest, I have also sometimes had calls with bright, helpful people who weren't limited to script-reading and reboot prompting. Shoutout to the Tier 1 guys and girls out there who have taken it upon themselves to be truly helpful.