Reality Upgrade

One major casualty of the computer revolution is the customer service representative.  Or at least, one that answers the phone when you call.

By now, we are all familiar with the “Please listen carefully to the following as our menu options have changed…” uttered in the dead voice of the chick from Terminator, and navigating the labyrinth of phone menus has become a skill all its own.

But when you really just want to talk to a real, live human, and mashing zero repeatedly isn’t working, you can try these two websites, both of which have “secret” phone numbers for quite a few companies that connect you directly to a person.

Get Human

Contact Help

So before you start cursing impotently at the uncaring, inhuman voice on the phone, try the numbers here.

Maybe you can curse impotently at an uncaring human instead.

Google Voice is a new service by Google that seems like it could save a lot of time and effort.  The service gives you a phone number, and then lets you add phone numbers to your account and set up different caller settings, so that different callers ring through to different phones.  You can also have some callers rings straight through to voice mail. And, get this, it converts the voice mail to text, and emails it to you.  

This is great for someone like me.  I hate to be interrupted by phone spam, but then I miss calls from my bank.  And then I have to listen to intermitably long voice mails with someone rambling for five minutes before mumbling their phone number faster than I can write.  This seems much easier.

One update to this service that just came out is integration with Android.  So if you have a G1, and all your contacts are already integrated with Google, this can be an especially useful service.  With the Android plugin, you can actually use your Android phone to place calls where the caller ID will show your Google Voice number. 

As an added bonus, this service lets you give out your phone number with impunity, and not worry about it.  This can be especially useful for anyone who has a tendancy to give out a lot of buisiness cards to random people (ahem).

The service is not open to the general public yet, but it should be soon.  When it does, I’ll try it out and report back.