Oh, the Humanity!

I shudder to think about the hours of my life that I (and, I am sure, you) have wasted trying to navigate through automated customer service call centers in an attempt to reach a real, actual, human being. I may have won a Nobel Prize by now for whatever it was I would have been doing with all that time had I not been on hold listening to Muzak or attempting to properly enunciate the last four digits of my Social Security Number so the substandard voice-recognition software could understand me. But no more! I have recently learned a few tricks to cut right through the interference and get a direct line to a homo sapien. The most basic tricks are to repeatedly press "0" until it puts you through, or with the voice recognition services, to repeat the word "agent". However, many tricky companies have learned to subvert these shortcuts, and will instead send you into an automated vortex from which you may never return. In that case, it's time to bring out the big guns. The genius, wonderful website www.gethuman.com lists the specific commands and tricks that will cut through the nonsense at over 1000 major companies' call centers and immediately get you talking to someone. Or, at least, in line to talk to someone. ("Your call is important to us...") Once you get that person, though, I'm afraid the website can't do anything about making sure that they will know what they are talking about.