Having worked phone support for a dial-up ISP in high school, I can confirm that tons of people will assume and skip steps for any number of reasons - faulty me

Having worked phone support for a dial-up ISP in high school, I can confirm that tons of people will assume and skip steps for any number of reasons - faulty mental models, misunderstanding the reasons we wanted to check things, who knows. If there was a "no dial tone" call the first thing I needed to check was obviously if the phone cord was plugged in. And I had a few of these calls that ended the same way: me several pages deep in the troubleshooting tree before the customer sheepishly admitting that the phone cord wasn't plugged in. I asked my coworkers and they all had their own tricks. One liked to have the caller unplug/plug the wire back in at the modem while they looked for a serial number printed by the jack. Another knew the Bell system pinout order and would have customers unplug and "check the wires" on both ends to be sure they "had the right wire". No one cared what the results of those questions were – of course the cord you bought from Radio Shack was wired up correctly. But you checking means you have to unplug and plug back in and that makes you discover that "oops, when I moved the filing cabinet I must've ripped the plug out of the wall". Or "oops, the pin on the back of the modem broke off and I was too cheap to get a new one and it wasn't making contact". Or whatever.