I want to talk to a person not a machine!

If that's what you shout whenever you call a bank or some other large nameless faceless institution - like a cable company, phone company, software company or government agency - then the website below is for you.

Your know the ones I mean. You call and get this: "Hello. Welcome to the xyz Bank. Your call is important to us. (yeah right). We have a number of options for you. If you want to find out about payments, say 'payments'." -- payments -- "I'm sorry, I did not understand. If you want payments say payments. " - - PAYMENTS. "I believe you said payments. Now here are more (freakin') options.

AAAAAARRRRRRRRGHHHHHH

But, check out this gethuman website. It tells you secret ways to get around those annoying computerized answering machines (on steroids) built to steer you away from talking to a human being.

I heard about it last month during a CBC Radio One interview on the program As It Happens. There are very few ways to get around the system. At least this gives you some tips on poking at it a little.

This is my first in a series of "That's a great idea, why didn't I think of that!" websites.

When you lose, you lose.

You could have heard a pin drop on the Red Mile.

Calgary Flames fans had been hoping for a big street party after game seven of their NHL quarter final against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. Instead they finished their beers and wandered home in their red and black flaming C jerseys. The bars on 17th Avenue quickly emptied out and the dozens of police who had been prepared for near riot conditions dispersed to places where there was more significantly greater potential for crime.

Like I said ­­­- you could have heard a pin drop.

The scene reminded me of an incident in Brighton, England in 1989. And, no, it wasn’t a hockey game. It was football (soccer) of course!

I believe it was a European championship playoff game between England and Germany. It wasn’t being played in Brighton; it was on radio. My girlfriend at the time didn’t care for sports or TV so I was listening to the game on my Walkman radio through the headphones. She was reading.

I told her, “England just scored.”

She said, “I know.”

I looked at her quizzically. How could she know? I was listening with headphones. She couldn’t hear.

She motioned to remove my headphones.

You could hear the cheers through the walls of our basement flat.

I laughed. I had only heard that kind of insane cheering once, a couple of years earlier, Calgary had beaten the Edmonton Oilers in a final game of a playoff series. The whole city of Calgary let out a yah-hoo.

As the England/Germany game proceeded, I decided I would venture into Brighton’s downtown with my tape recorder to record the festivities if England won. I was a freelance radio journalist at the time and I had arranged to do a column about “life as a ex-pat” on my old radio program back in Canada. I thought listeners might get a kick out of hearing some British soccer wackiness.

But England did not win and I figured: no victory - no victory party.

I went to bed.

Boy did I miss a party.

There had been a riot.

Not a "party" riot, a real no foolin' riot.

Not a big one but a riot nonetheless.

Some fans (hooligans? yobbos?) decided to take their disappointment out on some high street shop picture windows. They also roughed up some foreign students studying English at some of the many English schools in Brighton. If memory serves me I think the idiot fans managed to bust the heads of a couple of Spaniards and Frenchmen along with a German or two.

A riot and I missed it.

My girlfriend said “Lucky you decided not to go.” but of course she was wrong. As a radio journalist I would have had some fabulous sounds on tape. As it turned out, this was the only city in England where there was this kind of riot and I would have been one of the few people to record it. I probably would have made more than a few quid from it. I would have probably sold the story to some sports and news programs around the world that weren’t served by the BBC.

But, as I mentioned, I thought no victory, no story.

I had been fast asleep.

Chalk it all up to the lack of cultural understanding on my part. I am not suggesting the British sports fans are violent and Canadians are pacifist or that Brits are more passionate about football than Canucks are about hockey. God knows there has been more than a bit of blood shed on Canadian streets over wins and losses on the ice. And I know that football hooliganism in Britain is a far more complex problem than a few fans going nuts in a small seaside city.

This is just an example of one of those quirky things about culutral differences.

Apparently, losing makes some people sad and some people mad.