[lxgr]

> btw phone calls are still cool.

Not to large corporations. Have you called one lately?

It's a minimum of five minutes of bartering, begging and pleading with the IVR to let you speak to a human, and even then a successful outcome is anything but guaranteed.

[teeray]

Usually doing what the IVR asks is the slowest path. Confusing it by mumbling nonsense so it thinks it can’t understand or ramming never-ending DTMF tones up its input buffer until it chokes works well. For certain companies and certain departments (usually where my ongoing satisfaction is a concern for the company), I’ve sometimes found yelling repeated expletives at the hold music gets me connected faster. I have nothing to substantiate it, but my conspiracy theory is that there’s a customer rage meter that can be gamed (remember “calls may be recorded for quality assurance“). By contrast, when my call is a pure cost center (e.g. product warranty claims), I’ve found there’s a mandatory hold time to encourage you to hang up.

[c0pium]

> yelling repeated expletives at the hold music gets me connected faster

The confirmation bias is real!