Bash Zero Zero Zero to speak to a Human plz

First things - I’m playing around with some of the styling used in my frontmatter for these posts so that I can be happy things like Tags, Series and other things work in this particular older Hugo version that I am using as there’s a number of blockers prior to being to upgrade across this site and my others, and update the theme’s repo.

This will be a quick post. I promise. Cos whilst, yeah, I can drop a 102min 21k wordy post like in 🔗Job Searching: It’s 2026, So Why, Oh Why, is it so 💩?- blog.kilasuit.org🔗 this is much more to the point for you all.

GRRR Let me speak to a human FFS

So yanno when you try and ring a company or use their online web chatbots, and they’ve implemented a Screening Agent that kindly but somewhat mockingly asks you to explain what you are calling for, often replying didn't quite get that, please repeat or takes you through a process

Yeah that.

I fucking detest using them today. Especially as at somepoint some companies did have the 000 approach to getting a real breathing person to talk to you.

Mostly because of these few points

• No Online Page that shows you which buttons you need to press for the menus, leaving you with the maze to get through.
  • Now I dunno about you, but I prefer to read & search things upfront, rather than get more and more irate as I go though a gruelling and tiresome 3/5 minutes (on a good day) when dealing with these systems.
  • I’m busy (as are all you reading this) so this would help massively
    • reducing boiling my blood unnecessarily (& likely yours too)
    • speed up our Interactions with them, letting us get 💩 done
    • which reminds me of the 🔗The Interaction Notes Family - IINs, DINs, FINs🔗 which I’d started and have yet to find the time in getting back to. Which I will do.

Anyway I want the following things on all new Screening Agents on phone calls or on web chats

1. A Direct System Override that puts you in a General queue as opposed to a specific queue.
   • Sometimes it’s just nicer and easier to speak directly to a person instead of a mindless bot that can only read from a script to you.
   • Often it’s just genuinely quicker.
   • Most of the time, a quick human interaction is much more positive than it is negative. A delayed one, much less so.
   • This could implement the we will call you back feature that many already have built in. That would be a great win.
2. An Upfront and readable User Interaction Guide.
   • This 💩 is already in the code needed to deploy these Agents
   • So just fucking publish it to a simple static website generated from Markdown files (like this blog is but maybe instead use with a more complete theme) as the operating costs, including the regular updating of them is next to nothing.
   • Heck if push comes to shove just publish a site in PURE HTML like justfuckingusehtml.com or motherfuckingwebsite.com
3. A 3 time auto-fail pass through either to an actual person or with a call back.

Note: I have designed chat bots in the past, & wrote about them in my Assistive Tech Buddies Series, and always had a mechanism that would give a Direct to human bypass mechanism to not need people to

Lets make all our lives a little bit less GRRR by adding the above to these systems.

This is not just a “Ryan asking for Ryan” thing here either.

This is because we all have to deal with these Systems from time to time.

Lets just make them better and more bearable for all using them shall we.

Hopefully then they may not invoke a level of rage from you like they do for me & others when badly designed.

Chow4Now