Are you sick and tired of the machines that answer phone numbers that you call, and force you to waste time by depressing button after button. For example:

'press one for English'
'press two for Spanish'
'press three for customer service'
'press four for a billing problem'
'press five for payment instructions'
'press six to arrange payment'
'press seven .......and on and on.

All you want is a human being to help you.

Well, help is here! Paul English has examined several problem phone numbers that torture you with button pressing and has 'beat the system' by allowing you to depress a code to reach a human right away. I haven't tried them all; the few that I have tried really do work.

Give yout digits a rest!

http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr/

Judging by how some of the humans I have encountered recently do thier jobs...you might be better of with the menu and the machines.

That link is brillant! I know some of those codes but recently fell for the '0' feedback of 'invalid entry'.

The one big company whose voice mail has always overshadowed the Spanish Inquisition, imo , is Bell Canada.

That voice of Emily? The 'automated attendant'? Finally I discovered if you launch into a series of screaming swears as soon as you hear her voice? Emily transfers you to a real person.

I like paying my two bills locally on the phone because the two agencies are the rare ones who have someone live answer the phone and are very courteous. I always tell them how nice it is so that they know their work is valued.

Imagine being happy to pay a bill.

That's a great link! Now, have you got one for Australia?
























0

Interesting link, though only applying to the USA in this case. Seems though that pressing zero is the most common way of by-passing the annoying prompts, and I'll certainly be trying it.

Blinkybill, repeatedly pressing 0 often works in Australia. I do it all the time! Sometimes it doesn't work but most times it does.

WEll, who knew? I'll be doing that one too ... Telstra is my worst enemy, although when I think of it it's gets worse when there IS a human. Hmmmmm.

Also fun to try, if you get one of those that ask you for key words, like pay a bill, change service or whatever, just say off the wall random stuff and after a minute that annoying little voice gives you over to a real person...

I have to go with Mikey here - most of the time I'd just as soon get the machine, or at least rather have the machine route me to the correct human, rather than having to explain my problem to a succession of people who don't know what I'm talking about.
I think, like so much else in technology, it's a question of design - there are well designed systems, and there are badly designed ones.

Sometimes those machines drive me nuts.
Recently we put some trees on our front lawn, and had to call to find where the phone and gas lines were buried before we dug. I spent half an hour (literally - I do not exaggerate) going through all my options and speaking very carefully into the tape recorder. At the end of it all, the machine told me that some things weren't answered satisfactorily, and I was transferred to a live person. It took us a whole 2 minutes to review what had taken hallf an hour with the machine.
Why would I ever want to go through that again?

I'll add for the Brits what has become his second project based on the site say no to 0870. This gives real local numbers instead of having to use low-premium rate ones they give (0870, 0871 and now also 0845 as that's now based on earlier prices which are now cheaper when dialling a proper number). The ultimate aim is to make the premium calls to people (rather than recorded messages) illegal but the people who use them are probably also represented in all political parties so they wouldn't be likely to vote away any source of income, especially as they're used by the BBC as well.

Say no to 0870 search page. There's also an A-Z index which has many well known companies on it.