Over 15 minutes on hold, several layers of phone tree prompts delivered in a ponderous and faux erudite tone, a rep with a hard to understand accent, and getting disconnected in the middle of the call… sounds like your megacorp 1-800 line, right? Nope, it’s the FTC Consumer Help Line.

We read a story in the Portland Mercury about how Princess Cruise Lines was requiring a death certificate be sent before they would stop sending junk mail to a guy’s dead step-grandfather. That sounded wrong, and possibly illegal, so, failing to find relevant information online, we called 877-3824-357, the FTC Consumer Help Line. There we experienced probably the most annoying automated voice response system we’ve heard since we started blogging. Sheesh, we just have a simple question, you don’t need to take down all this personal information or route our call by a very specific subject matter (it didn’t help that our query kept falling under “other”). Maybe our experience isn’t typical but that phone tree needs some trimming.

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