Ask HN: Telco support horror stories

I've recently been reminded of the nightmare that is consumer technical support, via a weeks-long support call with Three UK that ended with them disbelieving my error report in favour of their remote diagnostic tools. It really gave me more empathy for users that rely on the software I write for their livelihoods.

Does anybody else have similar experiences, and would support engineers from telcos shed some light on how one could get past the "dumb user" filter and through to people that actually care about the network?

(In case anyone's interested, my problem was that Internet doesn't work in one small area despite a strong signal - which happens to the most important place for me, my home - but fine everywhere else. On two different devices.)