It's a good thing most laptop reformats these days just involve inserting the manufacturer's disk and rebooting. In that case the phone contact is just needed

It's a good thing most laptop reformats these days just involve inserting the manufacturer's disk and rebooting. In that case the phone contact is just needed for moral support. But I remember the good old days where you had to make a boot floppy, run a command line partition formatting utility, and then launch the OS installer from the CD. That would be a real feat to explain over phone.