Get Human

Calling customer service of any mega corporation should be considered a series of torture tests: button pressing, waiting, and decrypting. The button pressing test involves navigating through the menu trees of the automated phone system before you can actually receive any help or talk to a human being. The waiting test will test your patience because you will be on hold for a long time listening to some crazy music or recording. Finally, the decoding test will test your ability to understand English spoken with a very hard to understand foreign accent.

Although there's not much we can do about the second and final tests, we do have some help with our first task, button pressing. Go to gethuman database to view the cheat sheet. This site lists the button pressing sequences for many corporations' crazy phone menu trees so that you don't have to listen to the recordings. And a few companies actually have direct numbers to human beings. Now, you just need to have the patience and the ability to understand foreign English.