In my younger years, I spent a few months working for a small software vendor, doing tech support. Indeed, it was a thankless job, as I had to figure out precisely what users on both the Mac and Windows platforms were doing to mess up the product and help get them up and rolling once again.

This was before you had software that could take over a computer’s desktop and allow you to actually see what was going on, so I sometimes fervently wished for a functioning crystal ball to assist me in deciphering a customer’s imperfect technical and sometimes conversation abilities.

Indeed, while I’m apt to complain about bad support as much as anyone, I developed a new-found respect for the people on the front lines as a result of that job. When you get a knowledgeable and friendly support person on the phone, it’s as good as gold in helping you solve your problems.

So let me say this up front. Don’t call a company’s support line expecting inferior service, because you may just be creating the climate to fulfill your wishes.

While I realize you might be under severe pressure if your Mac is constantly crashing, your printer insists on remaining offline, or you keep getting dropped calls on your cell phone, voicing too much of that frustration will not always help you get the assistance you need to set things right. It might be a good idea to try the proverbial count to ten, take a swig of water or your favorite lubricating beverage, and get yourself prepared for the encounter.

Part of that preparation is not to get yourself falling down drunk, of course, but to assemble the information you need to properly convey your problem. If it’s your Mac, you’ll want to have the model, serial number, Mac OS version, memory configuration and similar information handy. You need to also be very specific in explaining the steps needed for someone to duplicate your problem, and this may require writing a few notes to prompt yourself should the need arise.

Basically, you can’t have too much information, because it may not always be possible to predict what someone needs to get at the source of your troubles.

If you find yourself repeating the same thing over and over again, and there’s a total lack of understanding on the other end of the line, you may want to insist on being connected to a supervisor or senior support person. I can’t say who might be at fault — and it could be the company for not delivering the support you deserve — but your goal here is to find a solution, and having an argument won’t get you past the starting gate.

In the end, of course, having a pleasant attitude may not make a difference. You still may end up thoroughly disappointed with a company. The choice then is whether to stick it out, choose a third party support person, if one is available, or take your business elsewhere.

Of course, support people also have their own horror stories to tell! Just the other day Denis, our friendly, neighborhood Web host, told me about spending five hours trying to help a new but unruly customer fix a mangled WordPress installation.

Now in case you aren’t familiar with that application, WordPress is an open source blogging tool that powers this site and even the online commentaries from the likes of The New York Times. It’s powerful, but also fairly simple to install and configure. While the basic setup process involves manual copying of files to your site, this is a trivial process, and getting your blog up and running shouldn’t take a lot of work; that is, unless you want to reinvent the wheel. Yes, we’ve done some of that, but carefully, very carefully.

As some people tell me, I know enough about such things to get into trouble, but also enough to stop short of that point.

In any case, this particular customer apparently harangued Denis to a fare-thee-well. Denis, you see, is a proper Englishman, and thus it takes an awful lot of verbal abuse before he gets hot under the collar. In this case, he eventually realized that this was one client he’d never be able to please, and hence he suggested that person would be happier taking his business to another company.

Indeed, it’s unfortunately true that there are both bad support people and bad customers. You definitely don’t want to be considered one of the latter. So be firm when you have to, but also try to be nice. You’ll be amazed how far a little sugar and spice can take you in this crazy world of ours.

So a client, a semi-retired jazz concert producer, called me the other day and asked me to set up a wireless router for him. I thought for a moment about the $60 variety available at many consumer electronics outlets, but then decided that this wasn’t such a good idea.

You see, this particular client wants something that’ll last a few years. He doesn’t want to have to replace the router frequently, which is sometimes the case with less costly products, alas. Besides, phone support for many of those companies can be dreadful, because it has been sent overseas and is handled by people with meager language capabilities.

I won’t mention the names of those companies. Instead, I decided to spend an extra $120 or so of my client’s money — with his full knowledge and consent — and chose the Apple AirPort Extreme base station instead.

That afternoon, I drove down to the Apple Store at the Biltmore, an upscale shopping center a short drive from the center of Phoenix, prepared for a quick shopping tour and a fast return home to set the device up before visiting the client’s home office the following morning.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

I heard it said once that the best salesperson is the one that believes in the product that’s being marketed heart and soul. It’s also been said that Steve Jobs can immerse himself in a “reality distortion field” in which those in his presence will believe everything he says is the truth and nothing but truth.

So do those two statements coincide? Is it true that Jobs is a masterful salesman who believes every product Apple builds is the best of its kind on the planet? Or is it all just a scam, a pose that Jobs adopts to fool you and I into buying more and more Apple products, not realizing they are no better than anything else out there, and may sometimes even be worse?

Personally, I’ve been buying Apple hardware since the 1980s, so I suppose that would make me one of the victims of this monumental fraud — except for the fact that Jobs wasn’t there for half that period. Besides, I am reasonably convinced that he really and truly believes this stuff. Or, as some might suggest, he eats his own dog food.

So when he told you, several years ago, that the Cube was one fabulous computer, he was fully convinced of that fact, even though it was a severely flawed product. Indeed, when he told a journalist, during a special session at the Apple campus, that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he asked if the Cube would soon be discontinued, I was present and watched Jobs carefully. Even though Apple didn’t wait very long thereafter to abandon the Cube, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jobs fought that inevitable decision until the last minute, and didn’t relent until he examined the sales figures carefully and had to accept reality. Reminiscent of the NeXT Cube, it was likely a pet project that he hoped would gain traction — and maybe it would have had it been much cheaper out of the starting gate.

Although Jobs keeps his personal life close to the vest, he’s certainly said enough in interviews to get a reasonable understanding of his personality with all its quirks, and his approach to running Apple. There was, for example, that interview in which he said in an extremely blunt fashion that employees who didn’t share his vision wouldn’t be working there much longer. Indeed, it’s easy to call Apple’s staff the Stepford Employees, but what he says makes an awful lot of sense if you look at the company’s history.

Years ago, it was common for Apple’s executives to work in competition with each other and push their own pet projects. That was during Apple’s decline, and it’s clear that the company has benefited by having its people walk lock-step in the very same direction.

Consider, for example, that Apple has a fraction of the development team as Microsoft, yet can consistently deliver more products that are superior in most every respect. Even better, with very few exceptions, Apple delivers those products on time and sometimes even ahead of schedule.

All right, I realize some of you will bring up Leopard’s delay, but that’s not the point. The key here is that Apple has a vision, one infused into every single thing they produce. From the ease of use to the extraordinary integration from one product to the next, it almost seems as if one pair of eyes watched every last one of them from conception to production. And between Steve Jobs and head designer Jonathan Ive, you might make that two sets of eyes.

Compare that to Windows Vista, which gives every evidence of being designed by committee, lacking a unified vision. In fact, you almost think, when navigating the byzantine array of control panels, that some of the developers were working at cross-purposes to each other.

This doesn’t mean that Windows is necessarily bad. Despite all its flaws, it does function well enough for people to get their work done. But it still comes across as an 80% product in a world where you can get something that’s closer to 95% when you choose the Mac OS instead.

Indeed, you can get a significant insight into what Jobs and his crew are thinking from the brief question and answer session at the end of their presentation at the corporate campus this week to introduce the iMac and all the rest. Jobs emphasized, “There is some stuff in our industry we wouldn’t be proud to ship. We can’t ship junk. We want to make the best personal computers in the industry.”

There are some who will disagree with that statement. But I think few will disagree that they Apple does indeed try harder.

Now perhaps Steve Jobs didn’t want to stretch out the session any further, not wanting to bore the assembled reporters or those watching the online version. But several product announcements came in under the radar. In fact, they were so low-key, they didn’t even merit press releases.

Talk about getting a tepid send-off. It reminds me of the movies that aren’t previewed for critics, because the producers fear they will get bad reviews. They hope that they’ll make enough money on the first weekend to make up for poor word-of-mouth and scathing write-ups.

But there’s nothing about the upgraded Mac mini that should warrant disparaging remarks. Admittedly, it doesn’t take a lot of research and development to plug in faster processors, extra memory and larger hard drives. That’s the sort of upgrade pattern that can be repeated for several years without changing the basic product. Then again, don’t PC box makers do that as well?

Regardless of the fact that the Mac mini remains under the radar, I think it’s a damned good computer. I have several friends who bought them, actually upgrading from G4 minitowers. Sure, maybe the hard drive isn’t so fast, and the graphics aren’t quite game ready, but the mini excels at most of the tasks regular people perform. Besides, if you have a leftover set of input devices and a monitor that still use useful life, the Mac mini is the cheapest way to take advantage of the latest and greatest that Apple has to offer. Or at least if you’re not doing high definition video editing or 3D rendering, of course.

It’s also a convenient way for Mac switchers to join in on all the fun without having to pay an arm and a leg. Besides, how many cheap PCs come close to the Mac mini when it comes to good looks and a reasonably complete set of standard features? In fact, how many of those computers even offer 1GB of standard RAM?

The other upgrade that arrived without any fanfare involved the AirPort Extreme. When the “n” version debuted in January, the critics said that Apple had short-changed you by not including gigabit Ethernet ports. Now I don’t understand the logic there, unless the cost of chips were, at the time, too high to keep the price from going much above the $179 level.

Well, regardless of the reasoning — and we’ll never know unless Steve Jobs writes a tell-all book about his experiences at Apple after he retires — it’s a worthwhile improvement.

Now if you have the older version, you don’t need to throw it out. That is, unless your Internet connection exceeds 100 megabits, of course!

What I did was simply to link my AirPort Extreme to my existing Netgear eight-port gigabit Ethernet switch. That device cost me about $80 when I acquired it a couple of years ago, and I see no need to toss it and the AirPort in the trash heap. In fact, this may just be a simple upgrade path for you, since you’ll get extra ports in the process, except that Netgear has perfectly awful tech support. Just a word to the wise.

The third upgrade is a peripheral for the Mac Pro and Xserve, a new RAID card that lists for $999. Other than the speedy redundancy with multiple hard drives that such a card delivers, this one sports a 72-hour backup battery for the built-in cache.

All right, the Mac Pro RAID card isn’t a terribly sexy device, but it does demonstrate Apple’s strong commitment to improving its presence in the business marketplace. Another notable factor is the addition of FireWire 800 to all versions of the iMac, rather than just the 24-inch model, and the ability to custom order a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme processor. That’s a chip that was, as of this week at least, unavailable to other PC companies.

Indeed, I’m just wondering whether a fair number of folks who might have purchased Mac Pros are now considering the iMac instead. Really, if you don’t need to add peripheral cards, extra hard drives or swap out the graphics card, it may well be that the iMac is a suitable — and much cheaper — substitute for many business users.

You should surely expect really good performance with the standard array of graphics applications on a new iMac, such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. The standard range of number crunching software should also provide stellar performance, and only those who need cutting-edge rendering speeds will find much lacking in the iMac. This is particularly true if you’re planning to upgrade from a G4 or even most variants of the G5.

But perhaps the most important thing about Tuesday’s event came during the brief question and answer session. Steve Jobs remarked that Apple wouldn’t go toe-to-toe with cheap PC makers, because they won’t build and ship “junk.”

That’s not just a reflection of his reality distortion field, in my opinion. It is an expression of Apple’s DNA. They always seem to try their very best, even if they do mess up on occasion.