Finally, Back Up!
July 7th, 2007If you have not (attempted to) visit my website in the past few days, you wouldn’t have noticed. The site was down through most of this past week because of a domain transfer that went wrong somewhere, and I ended up with a bad A-record and incorrect DNS servers. Well, I’m glad that’s fixed now. I was dreading having to get in touch with technical support by my domain and hosting providers to help get this fixed as soon as possible, but surprisingly, it was not too hard getting in touch with a person each time I called. Unfortunately, the fix itself took days to fix, because of the whole 24-48 hour DNS propagation time involved with each change (but that’s beside the point).
It is really nice to be able to get talking to a person when calling a phone-based service, despite the great advances that have been attempted (and accomplished by a few) in phone support technology - like voice recognition. Instead of hitting keys on my phone keypad, I can now be spotted (albeit rarely) conspicuously uttering single words, punctuated by long pauses, on my cellphone in public. English.. Register.. Yes..
Fortunately, there’s an easier way out in most cases. Thanks to the GetHuman project, a database of phone-based services along with the method of reaching a human at the other end of the line, is now available online. Check it out. Most of the time, hitting ‘0′ at each prompt helps speed up the experience, but a lot of services have different combinations, like a cryptic ‘1433′ code for Wal-Mart (but really, who in the world needs to call Wal-Mart?). I wonder if these codes are present for better assistance, or as easter eggs waiting to be discovered. I can say for sure, from experience - please consult the GetHuman directory if you’re planning to call your credit card company 
