{"id":9150,"date":"2005-09-17T16:20:33","date_gmt":"2005-09-17T21:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2005\/09\/17\/talk-to-a-human-being\/"},"modified":"2005-09-17T16:20:33","modified_gmt":"2005-09-17T21:20:33","slug":"talk-to-a-human-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/17\/talk-to-a-human-being\/","title":{"rendered":"Talk to a human being"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the annoying aspects of modern life is the inability to get a real person on the phone when you attempt to call the service department of a major corporation.  We&#8217;ve all been led through a labyrinth of touch-tone menu choices, only to discover that what we wanted wasn&#8217;t covered by the available options.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s your shortcut:  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quickbase.com\/db\/bam6rdiey?a=q&amp;qid=5\">Find-A-Human<\/a>.  It&#8217;s simply a list of phone numbers for various corporations (banks, computers, travel, etc.) with instructions on which keys to push in your phone to most quickly get a real person on the line.  Sometimes it&#8217;s sneaky &#8212; for Cingular, you can easily get a human by pushing the buttons as if you wanted to close your account, after which the person you get can help you with whatever you want.  More often it&#8217;s straightforward &#8212; for Chase bank, you hit five, pause, then hit one, four, star, zero, just as you might have guessed.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t say that Cosmic Variance never did anything for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the annoying aspects of modern life is the inability to get a real person on the phone when you attempt to call the service department of a major corporation. We&#8217;ve all been led through a labyrinth of touch-tone menu choices, only to discover that what we wanted wasn&#8217;t covered by the available options. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}