I know it's hard to do, but you should probably just have said ``Let me transfer you to someone who's better equipped for troubleshooting.''

I can't believe that this dipwad was actually so rude as to cold-call you with a customer on the line! Wow.

On the other hand, I'm in the same boat you usually are, and I've got the equivalent to your IT managers telling me how to do my job. Stuff like ``well, is that configured as a RAID 1?'' and ``are you using SCSI or fibre channel?'', and then explaining, incorrectly, why I'm doing it wrong. Very annoying. I just ignore him, though.