In 1995-1996 I worked for Gateway 2000 as a phone tech. It was frustrating but a lot of fun, and I made friends there I've kept to this day. You might think a job like that would attract a certain "type" and while it did, it also attracted a rainbow of people who all had some interest or passion for computers. There were hippies, preppies, curmudgeons, grognards and neckbeards and everything in between. Men and women both.

The craziest time I recall is when Windows 95 launched, there was this perfect storm of incompatible OEM junk:

1. Windows 95 being brand-spanking-new
2. The Ensoniq Soundscape ISA PnP card barely worked in DOS as it was
3. They were still selling an add-on kit of PC DOS games

For a few months in 1995 the call center turned into a gaggle of professional conventional memory configurators and PIF tuners. It wasn't difficult work, but it was tedious and repetitive. I personally configured hundreds of systems to run those DOS games in Windows 95 (well, in DOS mode), using a formula (that is well-documented nowadays) that resulted in 620k free, which was enough for just about anything without truly exotic requirements. By then most of the real exotic games were in the past and it wasn't long before DOS extenders made the whole exercise moot.

The work was complicated by the "official policies." One such policy, in name only, was that it wasn't our job to configure DOS for these games, but because they were Gateway customers, we were to do it anyway, while also pointing out the game publishers had their own tech support that was better at this sort of thing. The second policy was that we should use MEMMAKER to configure DOS and get the customer off the phone. Unfortunately, MEMMAKER was a piece of junk that never actually produced the results the customer needed, which ended up causing more calls down the road. I like to think that the customers I helped didn't need to call back. At least not until their Ensoniq PnP manager stopped working again.