There was a great editorial by Terry Bibo in our local paper today that hit one of my hot buttons. She refers to our "service economy" and puts it in the oxymoron class of "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp". Why? Because when you try to call a human being for service you can't get one. Her funniest comment was to disagree with Barbara Streisand because "people who need people are the unluckiest people in the world." No kidding.

I hate that and I love trying to beat "the machine" and get to a real person. Fortunately there is someone else who hates it more. Paul English, who co-founded the Internet travel site Kayak.com, has created something to assist what Bibo calls the "serve-each-other economy" - an IVR Cheat Sheet. Fabulous! It's getting 80,000 new visitors a day and he supposedly has 900 some cheats he hasn't been able to test and post! I will definitely look here first before calling for "service". I may even offer to help him vet some of those 900 new cheats.

I much prefer getting treated like a human being and having another human on the other end of the phone. Maybe that's hypocritical coming from a person making his living helping to create software enabling this kind of thing. Press "1" to complain, press "*" to repeat the list of options.