This collection of tips can come in quite handy. I already use a small Radio Shack device to “trick automated phone bots into thinking your line’s dead” (number 1), but I wasn’t aware of number 4 (“skip the greeting and get right to the beep with one keypress“).

I’m rather surprised at number 2, “get to a human operator with your dirty mouth,” though it makes perfect sense in hindsight. I once got so fed up with our Internet provider’s voice-recognition system that I started swearing at it at the top of my lungs, to the vast surprise of GoddessJ and a friend of hers who were in the room at the time, but it did get me a human operator instantly. At the time, I thought it was because the machine couldn’t parse what I’d said, but maybe it understood it only too well. 🙂