What you had there was an "old school" engineer
Or like me when I worked on a BT helpdesk, someone who has done the assessment and decided that if management want to kick them out for fixing the stuff they are supposedly employed to fix then they may happily use that decision as a suppository. Tolerate the job while it tolerates you but they're hardly a good employer.
My worst offense was teaching my colleagues that if the customer doesn't know the IP address of their router then ipconfig probably lists it as the default gateway. Or reassuring a customer who was worried about blocking her wireless router's line of sight by listing what my own signal at home had to go through. Using personal experience to inform your support was a massive no-no.
Funnily enough my usual response to customers swearing never got a response from anyone.
"Please be aware, these calls are monitored, so please don't say anything to me you wouldn't say to a little old lady, because some of our managers are right old women."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
