I think I have come up with a way of saving a whole lot of time and frustration in our modern internationally-outsourced-customer-service age…
I’ve just spent 30 minutes on the phone to tech support at a hosting company. The first 25 minutes were wasted on them presuming that I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t “is your computer plugged in?” but it was “are you sure you have enough space on your hard drive?”
Imagine if you could spend that 30 mins more efficiently by passing a test that verifies you are not an idiot. Then you could refer that test result to the tech support folk and they could take things to the next level straight away! Such a concept could save a billion hours of people like me being on hold while the guy in Pakistan takes a cigarette break and mutters “don’t these Americans know anything about phpmyadmin?”