I keep dialing ‘0’ (zero) over and over. That sometimes works.
Worst is “Tell me in a few words how we can help.”
No way in hell am I going to talk to a machine. So I keep dialing zeros until I break thru. Usually works.
No kidding. The most that the damn robots can answer is "What time is it?" or "Is the sky blue?" There are NO bots that do anything remotely useful. Banking bots that say "I can do things like tell you your balance" are less than useless.
So, sometimes I'll say "My left-handed feezle de-grammeter with the toroidal inverter is smoking, making screeching noises and threatening to kill me and my family. What do I do?"
Often it will respond "Let me get someone who can help with that."
Alternatively, I start off screaming "Human, Agent, Representative, Person, Associate, Support" and it'll say "I didn't quite get that. Can you repeat that?" I repeat that several times and the bot will finally say "I understand you want to talk to a person. Is that right?" And I'll scream "Yes, you ignorant, useless slut!! That is right. What was your first clue??"
Then inevitably the infuriating "Your call is very important to us. Our wait times are longer than usual."
I use Quicken software to manage our finances and they do a GREAT job still making it easy to get to a person. And almost 100% of the time that person speaks good American English and is competent.
Once when I FINALLY did get someone, I asked, “Are you human?”
Then I asked, “Can you prove it?”
That got a really good laugh from the rep.....