Please listen carefully as our menus have changed.

I recently had to call Samsung customer service due to a broken TV set. (It's actually a very long story that involved many calls over a 2-month period, but I won't bore you.) Shortly after that debacle, my Xbox went belly up with the dreaded three-red-light syndrome. That prompted a call to Microsoft Xbox support, and despite what many Microsoft outsiders think, Microsoft employees have no special access to such assistance. Both of these experiences required me to listen to a long menu of choices (and for some reason, all of these services have menus that have "recently changed" so you are encouraged to "listen carefully" to the entire, drawn out thing.)

Wouldn't it be nice if you had a way to look up a company's number along with the "secret" codes to punch in to get directly to a real, live human being? If only there were a massive network with information such as this that any person with a computer could access. It just so happens that there is just such a thing! It's called gethuman, and it includes a database of hundreds of companies and how to get straight to a real person. Very cool!