I'm Tired Of Talking To Computers...

On The Telephone, That Is...


For those of you that don’t know me personally, let me let you in on a secret.

I use E-mail extensively.

In fact, if you don’t have E-mail, you just might never hear from me again.

Some say that would be a good thing.

Nothing pisses me off more than for someone to hand me an e-mail address, then force me to call them a week later only to have them tell me "...OH, I have e-mail...but I hardly ever check it because I really don't understand those computer thingies..."

Why the hell did they bother wasting my time?

The same thing goes for computerized answering systems—they end up pissing me off most of the time.

When I'm in a hurry or otherwise want to actually TALK to a human, I pick up the telephone handset and go through the archaic process of placing a Telephone Call.

I understand that making a call on the telephone was a significant event in the early 1900’s. Folks looked forward to it because it made them feel important. People used to have friends and neighbors over for drinks, serve little finger sandwiches with the crust cut off the bread, or kill hogs and fry whole chickens in anticipation of the event.

Not so today.

Most people these days can actually hide behind a telephone. I mean really FAT people that couldn't hide behind a Toyota can successfully hide behind a cordless telephone.

Caller ID has made things even worse, particularly for men chasing the attentions of women and for bill collectors pursuing deadbeats.

Likewise, computerized voice mail systems have put an infinite number of highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers, et. al.) and lowly paid scumbags (the so called “customer (non)service” representatives) behind an infinite screen of zero’s, one’s, and three's that you are asked to dial on your telephone keypad.

I wish that I could invent a device that would deliver an electrical shock through the telephone to the chairs of the persons that I'm feverously attempting to reach through a computerized voice mail system.

I'd call it the Answering System Ass Phaser--or ASAP for short...

The intensity of the shock would be directly proportional to the number of rings I have to endure and the number of buttons I have to push after the initial ring of the phone call. I suspect that many telephones would be answered after the first or second ring if I were allowed to implement my new system.

In anticipation of my ASAP voicemail, I recall that last year I published a posting with a listing to a website that gave the phone numbers, often officially unpublished, to major companies like American Express or Best Buy with which you might have a beef.

By “Beef” I’m not talking sirloin here, I mean things like bitching about those pesky non-credited monthly payments on your credit card or yelling at the electronics salesperson about your DVD player that insists on shooting movie DVD’s across the room at high speed.

Yesterday my Fellow blogger Rodger over at Curmudgeonly & Skeptical posted a new link to an even better website called the “Get human database.”

It has the phone numbers and instructions on how to get to speak with an actual human instead of a computer voice mail system for 414 companies.

Click on the link and go check it out...you're gonna love me for it.

And don't make me have to call you...