Nothing whatsoever to do with search engines, but... The Phone-Maze Cheat Sheet ...is something that's very good to know about! — by Stephen Mahaney

People who are close to me know that I would rather chew glass than navigate through a phone maze just to finally talk to a human. That, my friend, is your best assurance that Planet Ocean will never force upon you such cruel and inhumane treatment.

Of course, we've all been subjected to such time-wasting ordeals as being forced fed our credit card balance and last payment details when, in fact, all we really wanted was to ask someone to please (oh pretty please) stop risking our credit and identity by sending those balance transfer checks in the mail (where they can be pilfered by just about anyone blessed with owning a hand).

Recently I experienced the frustration of trying to explain to a voice-automaton at United Air that I wanted to change an existing flight reservation. After about 30 minutes of failure, and several do-over calls, I discovered the magic word was Agent, which prompted the robot to pass me over to a human. Ok, not rocket science—I should have figured that out sooner, but I was too busy chewing glass.

Certainly we all have our own war stories,
but the good news is there's actually a solution!!

Compliments of a generous fellow by the name of Paul English (who this month is my hero) I present to you what I call the phone-maze cheat sheet! Paul calls it the IVR Cheat Sheet (whatever!).

By any name, it's the fastest phone-route to a human at (currently) 213 of the most popular (and obsessively over-automated) companies on earth (YES!).

The list below appears in a frameset an...