b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
Theme Design
IT Support
Hosting
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Find A Human
Zip past those annoying Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems using the Find-A-Human Quickbase by Paul English.What does this mean? IVR is the insidious way big companies avoid talking to you. Hire some woman with a robo-voice and get her to record layer after layer of idiotic droning that changes depending on which button you push. Of course, it's always prefaced by "Please listen to this entire message as our menus have changed." The menus have never actually changed, they just want you to wait on the phone until you get frustrated and go away.
Paul's Quickbase has direct bypass sequences for more than 75 companies. Better, if you discover the bypass sequence for a new company you can add it. Here are a few samples:
- Delta Airlines (utterly clueless) - Say "agent" four times - every time it asks for a response from you
- Dell Customer Service (an oxymoron) - option 1, xt 7266966, option 1, option 4, option 4
- DISH Network (clueful) - press "0" during menu
- Comcast (unnaturally clueful) - Customer service, but an IVR wants your number first.
Posted by: 
Terry Frazier at 2:02 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL |
Categories: Productivity, Technology
Terry Frazier at 2:02 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Productivity, Technology
Sunday, September 11, 2005
RSS Feed Format Updated
A query from Matt Mower has prompted me to correct some problems with my RSS feed. In the process I updated the format to RSS 2.0, adding support for pubDate, author, and categories. I also made some changes to the guid format that may cause your newsreader to forget which items have been read. My apologies for any inconvenience this causes.Saturday, September 10, 2005
terrywfrazier@gmail.com
I have added a gmail and google talk account to my ever-growing list internet communications addresses (I think it's up to a dozen now.) The number of comm points is getting silly. Thank goodness for Trillian, the all-in-one chat client for Windoze. Otherwise managing all these things would be even more difficult than it is.I've had a jabber account for a year or so, terrywfrazier@jabber.org, but the public Jabber network has never achieved the reach or stability that the bigger services like AIM and Y! have. I hope google talk will bring both. We'll see.
Posted by: Terry Frazier at 8:22 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL |
Categories: Collaboration, Productivity, Technology
Terry Frazier at 8:22 PM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Collaboration, Productivity, Technology
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
License: Unless otherwise expressly stated all original material, of whatever nature, created by Terry W. Frazier and included in this website, its related pages and archives, is licensed under a Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.
Disclaimer: This is a personal website. The views expressed here are those of the author and no one else. This is also an experiment in thinking out loud, so there are no warranties as to the reliability or accuracy of anything presented here. Source material -- references, citations, quotes, photos, and other elements -- are gathered from publicly available materials and some of it may be restricted. Any trademarks used are the property of their respective creators or owners. All are reproduced under the principle of Fair Use.