So I just spent so long on a phone call that I thought I might miss New Year's Eve…and I don't mean the one tomorrow night. I mean the one after that. My problem was one of these robo-operators whose artificial intelligence is not only artificial but largely missing. "She" kept asking me to enter the number of a prescription I was calling about and I kept entering that sixteen-digit prescription and "she" kept telling me "she" could not locate any prescription by that number and there didn't seem to be any way to move the call to any sort of next step until I'd entered one that "she" recognized.
In dealing with such robotic logjams, there's usually a magic word or phrase you can say that will get them to kick the call over to an actual human being. I tried "agent" and "human being" and "representative" and "pharmacist" and everything else I could think of and finally, "she" said she'd connect me with someone. I think but am not certain the magic words were "live agent." I've jotted that down in the Notes section of my phone listing for this company. But wouldn't it be nice if they told us what those magic words were up front? Or if they all worked on the same magic words…like "Open Sesame" or "Swordfish" or "Human being?"