Attitude. Fury with the product and company are generally OK. Personal spite against a tech who's never personally done you wrong drops you fast. Personal spite against someone who is doing their damnedest to resolve your situation really does not make them want to help you. At all.
Ability to learn. A quick study is better than someone who doesn't get it after showing them ten times.
Willingness to learn. Even if you have to be shown five times, if you're taking notes and really wanting to learn how this works, techs will start bending over backwards to let you meet them even part of the way.
Existing technical clue. More is generally better, but too much of the wrong kind is bad. Half-trained idiots who now know it all are asking to get a punch in the face.
Honesty. If you fucked up, admit it. If you know zilch about computers, admit it. If you think you know what's wrong, be crystal clear about what the exact hard symptoms are and what's your guess about the problem. Your guess may be the very thing, but it may not be.
The existing technical clue thing goes hand in hand with honesty. Pretending to have more technical clue than you do will screw you over fast; being perfectly honest about how much experience you have will be more likely to get someone willing to train you up some, if they're any good at what they're doing.
Cooperation. The tech is the trained professional, in most cases. The way you were trying to do it most likely didn't work. Even if you think you know how, go along with what the tech is telling you to do. Question if necessary, but don't fight about it, and for the love of everything sane and holy, if you do exactly what the tech tells you not to do, and screw it up worse, it is your own fault. Even if you know you're right and the tech is wrong, see point: Attitude about not being a jackass.
Communication. It really helps when everyone is using the right technical terminology and the same jargon to talk about these things. Failing that, there had better be the ability to go back to first principles and describe the things and work out mutually agreeable terminology so we can talk about them. And then there's the ability to describe what's going on over here and what's going on over there...
...yeah, I've been having fun at work. Can you tell? I've been getting really excellent marks on my customer service, because I'm coming at a lot of it from the perspective where eight times out of ten, the customer is undereducated in the field rather than being a dumbass. The ninth time, they're an OK tech themselves, although the tenth time? Dumbass. Not that I try to let on, and I'm a half-decent actor.
