I stumbled across this link while on some site or another and thought I’d share:

gethuman 500 database 

It lists the phone numbers and bypass codes to quickly get to a real live human being when calling a variety of government agencies, banks, and other companies.

For someone who is a bit on the geeky side, and a bit of an introvert, you’d think I’d prefer to avoid talking to a live person when I call these places but oddly enough the opposite is true.  And I don’t really mind a well designed numeric menu tree (I used to program those for Cisco VoIP software when I worked for City of Dallas) though I will say that some of them seem to lead you in a circle on purpose, hoping you will give up and hang up. No, the ones that really make me nuts are those new systems where you are supposed to speak your responses.

All those science fiction movies make talking to a computer seem so cool. It’s not. It’s annoying. You aren’t interacting with ’someone’ who understands you. Your responses are being run through a voice recognition system that simply looks for patterns. Personally I feel really stupid  talking to one of those things. Especially when they don’t understand me no matter how clearly I enunciate my response, or even more annoying, when they berate me for pressing zero to try and escape them… I can’t explain it, but there’s something particularly irritating to me about being ‘guilted’ by a machine.