It's part of progress. I think. Take certain, repetitive jobs away from crazy unpredictable drama-queen humans and give them to more sane, predictable machines.
(No wonder our economy is in the toilet!)
If you're like me, though, you'd get tired of talking to machines awfully quickly. Most of the time I'll hang up when calling a friend and his answering machine or voice mail picks up the call -- and I have that same technology on my cell phone.
But what about all those companies where you're going through prompts, punching in account numbers, hitting 1 for English, and hearing some computer-generated voice. Whatever happened to real live customer service?
Here are a couple of Web sites that supposedly give you the workarounds so you can get a real, live, warm-blooded human being in customer service land: dialahuman.com and gethuman.com. I haven't checked these workarounds out myself so I can't vouch for them, but you might find them interesting.
An article in Lifehacker discusses the Dial A Human service, and I urge you to scroll down to the comment section there. Readers submitted their own workarounds to getting away from the computer phone system. Some of these -- including pretending you're on a rotary phone (which I've done) -- or cussing like a sailor (which I've also done but not intentionally) seem to work.
Now, if there was some way to get a real, live, warm-blooded, intelligent human being in customer service, I want to know.
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