techrecovery | ESP and other random god-like abilities. (Reply)

This is going to hopefully kill two birds with one stone...
Anyways the obligatory "Hi I am new here" where I describe the fact that I have been working in technical support (basically) for 5 years now. Three years of which was with a Real estate software company and the rest with an undisclosed University

One thing that I have noticed in the many years I have worked is that there is a good portion of your job where you have to read minds. Now I always like puzzles, but trying to figure out what a person says is more difficult of a task than actually fixing the issue. I have it easy where I work now as I actually have root access on people's account information and can do some guess work. I still remember the horrible days of doing phone support though inwhere I didn't have such access and obtaining information was like twisting a person's arm.

BUT...

Here is the rant:
When you send an e-mail to technical support and it states "I can't login to any of the machines on campus."
Here is how my brain attempts to figure out the solution.
0) Of course the end-loser didn't copy/paste/write the error message in the email, because error messages are useless...
1) Ok this user is on either Unix or Windows since we have both systems... Probably Unix
2) Ok now is this person a grad student or undergrad... Most likely grad
3) Let's check the username and hope he sent it from his University e-mail account (which is possible...) SCORE!
4) Ok look up username on database, find out he is a grad student and hasn't opened up his windows account yet.
5) That must mean he only uses unix, so I now assume that he is able to login via ssh and not able to physically at the workstation (just an assumption)

After chugging with my brain deductions:

Reply in an e-mail stating "Hi, you must not be able to login physically at a machine... so Just ssh into any machine from home and type in the command [insert command to reset environment here]. Hopefully this works for you"

Get a reply later on that says "thanks for the quick reply that fixed my issue."

Main point of the story, ask as little as possible. Heck don't ask questions at all, just use a little bit 'o some of that ESP to predict what they are trying to say.