Why do people fight with and lie to tech support?

In the jobs I’ve worked as tech support, a majority of the issues people call in about are resolved by restarting the computer or power cycling the modem, relatively simple things to do even if you don’t know your way around a computer.

It seemed like almost every call I got either lead to the person stating they already rebooted (multiple times, even, usually close to a million), or throwing a temper tantrum and demanding I send someone out to fix their computer. Every single time, lo and behold, once I calm them down enough to give it a try, it works.

I get a lot of people telling me they’ve been network engineers or computer technicians for 10 years (a staple amount of time, I rarely hear any deviation from that amount), yet they can’t tell me things like what operating systems they use or whether or not they’re using a router.

Both of us want to get off the phone as soon as possible, but fighting and lying simply prolongs it. Is there some reason I’m missing that people feel threatened when they call tech support? Or that they need to skip small steps and immediately decide they have a huge problem?