Ok.
Being a "poorly-paid first-level technical support person", I believe that I can give some clarification about the call centre issue:
Technical support, regardless of the form, are given at call centres. Period. There are a few exceptions, like extremely small companies, but you won't find any major hardware/software vendor, that has it's own support.
The guality of english-speaking support has decreased over the last few years, as most english-language support has been moved to India or some other low-wage country. Large call-centre companies basically hire people off the street, as long as they speak good enough english. People don't want to talk to technicians that doesn't speak good english, so the technically skilled staff aren't preferred.
As the techies hired aren't the most technically enlightened people in the world, the engineers and programmers has to create rules for the them. Those rules have to be followed blindly; often it does not really matter if the technician know of a better sollution, as he's not really allowed to give it. Problems related to the operating system, or other software vendors will not be dealt with at all. In those cases a re-install is often recomended.
As the Scandinavian languages aren't spoken around the world as English is, it's somewhat easier to get skilled staff here. Linguistical skills aren't hard to find, so technical abilities can actually be requested.
Most Scandinavian support is resided in Sweden, as the wages here are lower than in Denmark, Norway, and Finland.
Anyway, there is nothing causing so many problems as the fact that men generally refuse to read the manuals. Questions coming from women are generally more technically challenging! :lol:
