Once in a great while, you'll get a cool person on the other side that is willing to use a little logic instead of running through the flowchart/checklist.

My college roommate was playing a PC game when his monitor flickered, sparked, and started spewing smoke. He told that to the CSR on the phone and they said "...I think we can skip the first half of these questions." Ended up being a 5 minute call, with a new monitor arriving in the mail a day and a half later. So, occasionally it works.

Which monitor was that? Was that a common issue?

Moving this video to ant's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

This was roughly 13-14 years ago. It was a 17" CRT from TigerDirect (maybe a ViewSonic? not sure), and a TigerDirect CS Rep handled my friend's call. I kinda doubt it was a common issue, but the guy on the phone was an American (or had a US accent at least), and sounded like a knowledgeable IT guy (nerd like us).

We weren't particularly impressed with the quality of parts coming from TigerDirect back then, but at least that one service call went about as well as one could hope for.