Having been a tier III responder on the U.S. Navy's Personnel Help Desk operating out of Navy Enterprise Data Center New Orleans, I can tell you that if a Help Desk agent exhibited that behavior while the phone was ringing or people were on hold, they would immediately be taking a walk to the front door without a job and without their Navy credentials. I know the jokes. A lot of the scammers and spammers pretending to be on a help desk deserve to be the butt of raunchy humor as well as the target of vituperation and contumely. And to be honest, the "coffee cup on the CD-ROM tray" joke (in the "Three Dead Trolls" video) has been around since MS-DOS days. We had our own problem classifications, and one of the most common was PICNIC... Problem In Chair, Not In Computer. So yes, there were times when a user calling the help desk ended the call feeling someone dumber than a box of rocks, and deservedly so.
However, it wasn't all fun and games. At NEDC-NO, we were told that when that phone rang or when we got an e-mail that documented a ticket requiring our attention, there was only one circumstance of higher importance and that was our assigned system being down. Which if it actually happened, was probably the most likely reason for the trouble call anyway. If a user's problem made it all the way up to tier III, we were forbidden to put the caller on hold. We were set up for hands-free operation so we could talk and type at the same time (for those of us who actually COULD talk and do anything else at the same time... how do you think you GET to be a tier III responder?)
Fortunately for me, most of the time the Help Desk tickets were resolved by fixing the aftermath of someone trying to do things they should not have done such that the system's security software caught them and locked down the account. The Help Desk could change passwords for users in a certain group, but if a security lock-out occurred for a file or an account, that required system admin intervention. Sort of like the moderators here on AWF. We can short-term ban any members who are excessively disrespectful and permanently ban spammers. We can move threads to different headings and such, but it takes Jon or his system admin to do things that are out of the mod's abilities.
@NauticalGent - The long lead time for a technical help desk is kind of odd to me, but there ARE things that get reset automatically after 24 hours (or some other time, because often, the timeout duration is set by local group policy). So if someone asks if you still have the problem, they MIGHT be hoping that you had an issue that expired on its own. Let's face it. Even when we have good intentions, we can still hope to have caught a lucky break on a problem.