Yesterday, I had to contact my bank (one the three largest in the USA). As every environment-friendly citizen, I’m not using paper statements – everything’s online. Logged into my bank account and followied the link Contact Us. Even before clicking on this link I knew that it’d take time to find the phone of the customer support to I could talk to a real person and not to this stupid and useless chat “Hi, I’m Alex. What can I help you with today”. Nothing, really, Alex. Sending me a link with FAQ won’t help in most cases (is F still for “Frequently”?).

Needless to say, the first two minutes of browsing in the customer services pages didn’t yield any results. It seems that the content providers for these pages get paid by the time they can keep a customer engaged into this hide-and-seek game. And, let me tell you, they are getting better and better over the years. They are winning.

I gave up, and decided to download my monthly statement hoping to find the customer support number there. I’m genius! The phone number was there, yay!  I was still a little irritated, and to let the steam out, had twitted about it.

The helpful advice came right away from my follower @slavkous. Thank you, Slava! He sent me two links – apparently, these kind people went to this frustrated experience too, and created simple lookup services to find those bloody numbers (I’m trying to sound British here). These are the life savers:

1. Get Human: http://gethuman.com/

2. Contact Help http://contacthelp.com (love this image on their home page, btw).

Bookmark these sites. Write these links on a small piece of paper and put them in your wallet. Had these link tattooed on your arm. Don’t leave home without them. Next time your wallet with all your credit cards is stolen, these links will be priceless for canceling all your CC accounts.

It’s time to work. Gotta run.