Not at all: it's you who don't seem to have read the post. He reaches a person, who completely fails to help in any way. Eventually after a further series of emails, someone cancels his order and fails to ship him the actual phone he'd been waiting for. I can't see how calling Support earlier would have helped.

You are right, I confused Saurabh and Æsa. However, 5 days after calling, he received an offer to cancel the purchase & disable the device, which may indicate that the phone call did help trigger something.

Which still wasn't what he actually asked for or wanted. "Please place your order again" was the wrong answer when he already placed an order and the system clearly had that order on file.

You are wrong. The right quote is "Your order will be cancelled and refunded within the next 3-5 business days. If you still want the device, please place a new order", which makes sense. IOW while the first order was being cancelled, the representative informed that if he still wanted the device, he should place a new order.

Wrong how? Everything you quoted agreed with the post you replied to.

It most certainly does not make sense to cancel the order for someone that doesn't want to cancel.

My point is that the order was not "on file" anymore as it was being cancelled/refunded.

I agree it is inconvenient to ask a customer to cancel and replace an order (the support rep could be doing that transparently for the customer), but it seems it was a very unusual case (theft or loss of the package) so it is reasonable to expect a somewhat unusual process to resolve the situation.

Not the same problem but my Nexus 4 stopped recognizing SIM cards. I do not have a landline. Only way to make first contact with Google Support is by phone. Therein lies the rub. Once I did get my friend to lend me their phone it was pretty painless but it was still silly that the only means of making contact is by phone and then every other bit of correspondence since there was by Email.

One other option might have been making the phone call from inside Gmail via your computer.

http://www.google.com/chat/voice/

I've personally learned the hard reality that most people currently alive cannot use email correctly and therefore demand that everyone they do business with provide phone support. Because of this, the path of least resistance is to just be like them and get used to calling when you need something resolved. (And the reality is, it's faster for the people at the other end, which is why it persists.)