A Sad Realization

As I've gone from a kid who is good with computers to MIT student to MIT grad working in electronics, I've kind of felt like eventually I should hit a point where tech support people treat me like slightly less of an idiot.

My current job is designing part of commercial WiFi chips. A few days ago I was calling AT&T because I occasionally lose internet access for short periods. The tech support person decided it was a WiFi problem. I tried to explain that it doesn't make sense since it is not that I get an error from the browser but an error page sent by the router which is delivered over WiFi. That got me nowhere. (No, I didn't mention what I do for work, I didn't want to be that guy).

The individual incident is a pretty mild tale of dealing with tech support (it is not like I was trying to explain the difference between 1 cent and 0.01 cents). But it has forced me to realize that I will never be qualified enough to convince a tech support person to trust me over where their script has led them.