Remember Ernestine, the telephone operator from "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In?"

The Lily Tomlin character whose "one ringy dingy, two ringy dingy …" was followed by the nasally greeting: "A gracious good morning to you. Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?"

Although Ernestine may not have been the "perfect" telephone operator, at least she was a person, a human voice at the other end of the line.

Nowadays, whether I'm calling my doctor's office, a credit card company, the bank or my children's school, I get a flat, mechanical voice with a list of options — options that, if I'm the least bit distracted, I have trouble following.

The first part of most of my calls are recordings that tell me "to listen carefully to all the menu options before making a selection," that my "call will be answered in the order in which it was received," and that I have "approximately a three-and-a-half-minute wait to speak with a customer service representative."

But the message I find most irritating, the one that sends me over the edge, is "your call may be recorded for quality-assurance purposes." Baloney! If a company was really interested in quality assurance, I wouldn't be listening to a recording in the first place.

Today, instead of listening to an Ernestine, we get IRV, an Interactive Voice Responder that has replaced the friendly telephone operators that once directed our calls to the proper person or department.

But there is hope for us consumers. It's called www.gethuman.com, a Web site devoted to helping humans connect with other humans, especially when calling businesses across the United States. A grass-roots movement run by volunteers and powered by more than one million people (or so the Web site says), www.gethuman.com is working to achieve high-quality phone support from all U.S. companies.

Visit www.gethuman.com and you'll find helpful hints for bypassing IRV. Of course, the most obvious one is pretending you have a rotary phone, although that tactic loses credibility with each passing year. (We still have one working rotary phone in our home, although we only use it to answer the phone, as no one has the patience to dial out.)

But gethuman also points out that by pressing a series of zeros, a human will often come to your assistance. And if you make several invalid responses in a row, IRV is more likely to connect you to a human, although, the Web site cautions, sometimes that person might hang up on you because you've reached him or her through trickery.

Another cunning piece of advice: If you ask to be switched to account collection or account cancellation, IRV will usually connect you quickly to a real person, and then you can be switched to the department you really wanted.

The most popular feature of www.gethuman.com is the database of secret phone numbers and codes to reach a human when calling U.S. companies. More than 400 are listed, some with direct-dial lines to people (I've used several) or ways to get around IRV, like dialing zero at every prompt or by not pressing or saying anything when prompted to do so.

Given a choice-between the synthesized voice of IRV or Ernestine's "ringy dingy," I'd chose Ernestine any day!