Surely one of the biggest bugbears of the modern age are those automated telephone answering systems that try to answer your telephone calls, but rarely actually do. It seems to make no difference whether you are trying to speak to your bank, a utility company, or any large corporation, you are almost certain to be faced with a computer inviting you to make a selection. Press 3, and on and on.

Only yesterday when trying to obtain some service on my crackly telephone line I was invited to press a certain digit. After leaping over no less than eight separate hurdles I was finally assailed with this glorious message, “we are experiencing a larger than usual number of calls at present, and cannot immediately take your call. Please try again later!”

Perhaps if seemingly half the population weren’t chasing themselves around these computerised mazes of infuriating messages like crazed rats in a wheel, the company in question wouldn’t have been fielding so many calls in the first place. Whatever happened to personalised company service anyway? If I ran a small business in that fashion my customers would soon let me know about it, so how come the big boys can get away with it like this?

However, all is not bad news because there are now flourishing new services from alert businesses offering “cheats” and advice on how to confuse and get by these infuriating messages. One of the simplest is when you are first invited to press 1, or whatever digit it might be, that you do nothing. The theory is that the computer then believes that you are ringing from a phone that is not a touchtone, and simply passes you through directly to a human being. Another regular cheat when you first get through is to press “zero hash” three times at speed, that sometimes

There are even web sites out there now that specialise in providing the latest cheat information, and if it is important to you that you receive personal human service quickly, then they are well worth keeping an occasional eye on. One such site is www. paulenglish.com/ivr though there are several others, and these provide regularly updated information on how to skip by those computerised nonsenses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Of course the ultimate answer would be for the big corporations to make a return to providing actual human customer service, but unfortunately that seems unlikely, because they are expensive to staff and maintain, and many of these giant organisations have discovered that they can get away with offering a minimum standard of service. In that case, I invite you to do what I do, move your account to someone else, someone who will provide a decent service, for there are still businesses out there who will do so, though regretfully they are becoming harder and harder to find.

David Carter’s latest published work is SPLAM! Successful Property Letting And Management. Splam! contains over 240 pages of hints and tips on how to start your own property business on a limited budget, and how to successfully let residential property. You can view actual extracts of the book at http://www.splam.co.uk and order a download or a hard copy at this site or you can go direct to the publishers at http://www.lulu.com/dc He also runs a holiday cottage website where you can access over 7,000 holiday cottages, apartments and villas worldwide at http://www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk Don’t you deserve a holiday? Well of course you do! You can contact David on any matter any time at supalife@aol.com

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