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Here is a Web site that is waging war on annoying telephone answering systems that prevent you from reaching a human at credit-card companies, banks, insurance companies and more.

Look at this cool collection of phone numbers and tips on how to quickly get a real person on the phone. 

In addition to being a great tool for journalists, it is an interesting story. What fun it would be to call government offices and businesses in your town to see how difficult it is to get a human on the phone. Be sure to call your newsroom, too.
 

The GetHuman Web site offers these tips for navigating through phone-answering trees:

To find the toll-free phone number for any U.S.-based company, try calling (800) 555-1212 or search Google for company name plus "phone numbers." Or maybe even searching for the company name and "president office" or "investor relations."

For companies who try to hide their phone numbers, many times the Google search will find a page from a disgruntled customer who exposes the phone numbers for that company. For example, see these gripe pages about Amazon.com and PayPal and these for eBay.

For a public company, you could also try searching EDGAR. The "10k" report includes information about corporate officers and the official company mailing address.

You could also try looking up their contact information via a "whois" database: internic, godaddy, whois.net, etc.

The Web site also adds these suggstions:

Once you have a phone number, here are some tips to try to get through the computer to get to a live human:

1. Interrupt.Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly.  [...]
2. Talk. Say "get human" (or "agent" or "representative") or raise your voice. [...]
3. Just hold, pretending you have only an old rotary phone.
4. Connect to account collections or sales or account cancellation; they always seem to answer quickly. First, ask them for their name and rep number (so they know you are writing it down, and thus so they are more likely to help you). Then ask them to transfer you to the department you need. [...]
5. Selecting the option for Spanish will sometimes get you a bilingual human more quickly than if you just waited for an English-only operator.

Abusing Nasal Sprays

The New York Times says it is more common than you might think.

Private Tutoring Costs a Bundle

The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press examines the high cost of federally funded school tutoring -- which is much higher than before the No Child Left Behind Act. The feds are expected to spend $2 billion a year paying for tutoring by non-profits and school districts, the paper says:

Federally funded tutoring programs provided by Hamilton County Schools before the education reforms took effect cost about $500 a student, said Lucile Phillips, who heads Hamilton County's federal programs office. Now, however, No Child Left Behind prohibits school districts from using their own tutoring programs. The districts must use their federal dollars to pay private companies to give students extra help. With the change, Hamilton County's tutoring cost rose to $1,300 a student, Mrs. Phillips said.

"I wasn't in it to make a profit," Mrs. Phillips said of the school system's in-house tutoring programs. But private companies are, she said. "And they're using the same teachers I was using," Mrs. Phillips said.

To date, neither the state nor the federal government has evaluated the private tutoring services. A planned assessment in Tennessee was due last month and has been touted as a national model, but state officials say it will not be complete until later in the spring. 

Last summer, NPR also looked at how tutoring businesses were cashing in. In May 2005, the PBS "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" also took a look at the fight to get a piece of the federally funded tutoring programs. 

In May 2005, WITI-TV in Milwaukee decided to see what tax dollars were paying for. (To read the full story, click on the WITI link and search for "tutoring.") Some of the tutoring classes were nothing more than babysitting services, while others were terrific. The station learned that some tutors were earning nearly $100 per hour per student, meaning it was possible for one tutor to earn $730 for two hours of after-school tutoring. The station also reported:

Because so much money is at stake, the federal after-school tutoring program has become a very competitive business. Tutors told FOX 6 they are under pressure to both sign up students and to keep them coming. If students do not attend their tutoring sessions, the tutoring companies do not get paid. As a result, many of the tutoring companies now offer student incentives to keep kids in their after-school classrooms. Through an open records request to Milwaukee Public Schools, FOX 6 discovered some tutoring companies offer students mall gift certificates, tickets to sporting events and amusement parks, Sony PlayStations, $100 visa gift cards, and personal computers -- incentives meant to reward students for attending their tutoring sessions. 

Other Resources:

• The National Tutoring Association
• This page provides a basic overview of the Supplemental Educational Services (SES) provision of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Test Your Open-Records Knowledge

The Sarasota, Fla. Herald-Tribune's Web site includes a nice Sunshine Week interactive quiz to test your knowledge of open records and FOIA laws. How would your newsroom do on the quiz? How are your state's laws different?