Find the Human..!

One of the least controversial statements that you can make is to say that phone trees suck.

Certainly, the invention of the phone tree was a major breakthrough in the field of human resource management. Any time a real human employee speaks with a customer, it eats into the profit margin. In theory, the phone tree helps route your call within a large organization to the person who is most likely to be able to help you, or even answers your question without a person being involved at all. In actuality, phone trees range from useless to malignant.

The useless ones keep you picking your way through irrelevant options until your cell connection is dropped after 45 minutes of hunt and peck ("If you have trouble connecting to the Internet, check out the troubleshooting page on our Web site!") . The malignant ones deliberately try to deflect consumer traffic by getting you to hang up. Anyone with the brains to dial knows that until someone answers your call, you are waiting for an available operator. The executive who decided that a recording stating this fact needs to be played every 10 seconds for a half an hour will certainly burn in a very nasty section of hell, if there is any justice in the universe.

In any case, once again the Internet rises to the occasion. Getting to a human being is the Holy Grail of customer support, and you need to get there as quickly as possible. Here is a list of phone tree shortcuts for a whole bunch of US companies. Use these secret passcodes and your missing cheese log gift package will be on your doorstep before you can say "your call is very important to us"...