I hate voice trees in answering systems.

It is one of the things that makes my blood boil. Particularly if I am on the phone for twenty minutes and finally get through to a human and find, as I did on one occasion that somewhere in the routing, that I had somehow slipped out of Visa's system into another company that must have had a shared CRM system.

Anyway, as I was listening to the podcast from NPR of the story of the day, I heard a story about a guy who has created a cheat sheet of things that you can do to fool the system and put you through to a human. And fast. He has had more than a million hits to this segment of his site in the last month.