One of my pet peeves for years has been the proliferation of automatic answering systems for nearly every American corporation. You call the customer service number of any company and you get that standard line, "be sure to listen to the entire message, because our options have changed." Trust me, the options haven’t changed. It’s a standard line used by most all systems to delay efforts to talk to a real person.

Then come the menu choices.

If you are a retail customer, press 1: if you’re a wholesale customer, press 2, etc, etc. Then you press one and the menu tree grows larger: if your question is about home improvement, press 1: if your question is about appliances, press 2, and on and on. After going through the entire menu you may finally be given the choice of speaking to ‘the next available agent.’ If you’re lucky.

You’re likely then to begin the unbearable wait for the real person, while you listen either to something reminiscent of elevator music or repeated commercials for the company you’re calling.

Want to end that whole maddening process? Here’s how:

I’ve found a way around this time consuming, wasteful process. It’s a Web site called ‘nophonetrees.com.’ An NBC6 viewer, Fred Schall, who watches South Florida today on nbc6.net from Washington, D.C. sent me the link: www.nophonetrees.com.

I’ve tried it several times and IT WORKS!

Here’s how: you go to the Web site and choose the company you want to call. You can call up a list of companies based on what they do, or simply a list of all companies for which this process works. And there are HUNDREDS!

You click on the company name (for instance, Delta Airlines) and up comes the company’s customer service 800 phone number.

Now the fun part: you input your own phone number and click ‘fetch.’

The FIRST time you use this service you’ll get an immediate call to confirm your number. That happens only once. You click pound to confirm, and then hang up. Within a minute (as the site's computers deal with the computers of the firm you’re calling) your phone will ring again! This time, there will be a LIVE agent from whatever company you’re calling. Mission accomplished. No time wasted. No phone menus to wade through, and no mind-numbing music to listen to.

All in all, it’s a great Web site. Try it. You’ll love it!

Bob Mayer