Customer Service??

My dad emailed me this morning. He said he enjoyed my Hypercommunicating post, but he found communicating with Customer Service to be the exact opposite of Hypercommunication. He recently got a new PC and has been on the phone and email with customer service non-stop since. He asked me if there were any good tricks and techniques to get around this customer non-service situation.

I told him that I am increasingly avoiding the customer service from the vendors and going to directly to the Net. See my previous post about Powerpoint as an example of one way to do that.

I have found all kinds of amazing Internet resources via Google that answer my questions quickly and better than customer support.

I am curious if all you out there have had the same experience?

And since this post is partly an attempt to give my Dad some good ideas, please give me comments.