When my Dell Latitude laptop began to act strangely last November, I spent more time in phone system hell than I would have liked. I ultimately grew so frustrated with being bounced around by both phone system and humans that I drove two hours to my nearest Apple store, walked up to a truly smart and helpful woman, and said, I want to switch to a Mac. Now. Please oh please.

I’m happy as a clam with my dual-core MacBook but haven’t forgotten what others have dubbed “Dell Hell.” And I know better than to conclude this is just a Dell problem…if anything, I’ve found Dell customer support to be excellent over my past 10 years of Dell ownership. How I wish I’d known in November about GetHuman.

GetHuman is a database of 500 phone numbers at major U.S. companies and the buttons you can press to get a human on the other end as quickly as possible. Arranged in categories like Hardware, Internet, Government and Travel (think airlines and lost luggage), it’s a simple list to navigate and well worth bookmarking for the day you want to avoid the black void of some companies’ phone systems. The site says this about their origins:

The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.

I got a chuckle when I was on the site today to write this post and found the home page featured a recording of another one of Dell’s downer moments. It was so uncannily like my own Dell debacle that I couldn’t quite believe it. Have a listen if you want a great example of ways conflict escalates rapidly in poorly functioning systems.

I found GetHuman via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. Thanks, Kevin!

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.