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Trapped in Telephone Purgatory?
Use These Short Cuts & Break Free
Does this scenario sound familiar? Your latest credit card statement comes in the mail, and there's an error. You know that it needs to be dealt with, but for some reason you keep putting it off. Then it hits you. The reason for your procrastination is that you just cannot bear the thought of calling "customer service". Just the idea of facing a telephone maze of pressing buttons and repeating personal information over and over again is so daunting, so loathsome, you actually consider just paying the charge.
The good news is your days of wallowing through the Dante's Inferno of customer service phone systems are over. Thanks to a computer programmer/blogger named Paul English, you can now talk to a real human being in a fraction of the time. You see, Paul and his Internet friends have taken the time to compile a list of some major companies along with shortcuts you can use to reach an operator on their systems. Here are some examples:
To see Paul's entire list of company phone numbers and instructions, simply log on to www.gethuman.com and click on the "Database" link. You may even want to create a bookmark to the website on your computer both at home and at work.
Mr. English is completely dedicated to the customer service cause. Along with publishing this potentially time-saving information, Paul provides the ability to rate a company's customer service and allows anyone with information about bypassing customer service phone menus to contribute what they know. Both features can be found by clicking on the "Sitemap" link on the website.
Companies are constantly changing their phone systems, so Paul's list is always in flux. Lucky for us, the most current information is only an Internet connection away.
If you know of any helpful or time-saving websites, let us know, as we'd love to hear from you!
Our Childhood in Black and White.
I think you'll enjoy it. Whomever wrote this, described childhood to a T.
Black and White
(Under age 35? You won't understand.)
You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.
We all took gym, not PE . and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.
Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.
I recall a friend from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front step, just before he fell off Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?
We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA, AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED. I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING.
Remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.
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