Ok, so I won’t bore you with the back and forth details that led up to this. The important thing to know is that I needed to talk to a human at the IRS to ask a very simple question that would take just a few minutes to look into.
Me trying to call for 3 days dozens of calls dealing with this shit. I eventually figured out how to prompt the AI to let me push buttons to reach menus.
After all that I plotted out what each option does.
ALL OF THEM either lead to a pre-recorded message that says to visit the website, OR attempts to transfer you, before telling you there are no agents taking calls for that option.
Eventually, I wondered what would happen if I said to the AI agent “TAX FRAUD”.
Boom. Straight through to an agent.
I feel bad for lying to the hotline, but also, I was left no valid options to talk to a human. Once I said tax fraud, my issue which I had spent probably 100 calls in 3 days trying to get through, was over in 10 minutes. And 6 of those minutes she put me back on hold to research my issue.
Fuck AI
Sometimes too if you swear at the chatbot enough it’ll escalate you to a human.
May not work for IRS or government agencies but it does tend to work for companies.
I’m certain some of those calls by me were profanity laced. I have no kids, and live alone. So me talking to a spatula isn’t out of the question, and cursing at whatever I’m angry at is pretty common at my place.
So I’m sure just instinctively I cursed this AI out a few times.
Plus…it’s AI. If AI isn’t to be cursed at, what is?
Last time I swore at a chatbot it hung up on me
I usually mumble. That usually gets me to a human.
For most companies I speak complete jibberish. Then it’ll say something like “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you. Could you repeat that?”
And do it 3 times, and it will route you to either a push button system where you press a number for an option (yay!) or a human (YAAAAAAY!!!).
Sometimes itjust hangs up instead.