NEVER ENTER ANY MENU CHOICE WITH A KEYPAD, PRETEND YOUR Phone is a rotor type.
And just keep repeating that You want a Representative/Live Person until You get one.
If You’re lucky enough they might even speak English !!!
Asiana Airlines! Based in Korea, always closed when we’re awake, and you get an ARU. (Audio Response Unit). I’m usually VERY good at getting past these things (I wrote code for one in the 90’s). And There was nothing I could do here. “0” over and over would just get it to repeat the prompt a few times then it would just hang up on you. Yelling did nothing, etc. I resorted to going to LinkedIn and finding the names of employees so that I could look them up in the “Employee directory” so that I could be transferred to them. (They never answered, and never returned an e-mail, or a phone call, or a LinkedIn message asking for help).
I used to manage those systems for a large bank and hospital network. In the hospital, we would default out to the switchboard FAST because of emergencies. But at the bank the system would offer a rep close to the front. That said, if you want to get to an agent I found that if you keep pressing the most obscure options you will narrow down the choices to obscure things…and they will have to send you to an agent. These are usually the last options they give you in a menu.
Sometimes if you do nothing…the system will offload you because it used to think you did not have a touchstone phone. Those are rare these days, but the last time I programmed a system it was still a default we had to consider—and that was 5 years ago.