Someone else asked if this was a real thing (I also had my doubts) so I did some quick searching – as far as I can tell this is legit. I also found a macro photography site that has a bunch of adorable pictures.

I was hoping there was some law (or at least fear of a lawsuit) that kept that functionality around for accessibility reasons. I suppose with the PSTN phasing out the last of the analog bits they don’t even worry about rotary phones anymore. Would still be nice to have the “Shibboleet” functionality…

You might already be trying this, but whenever I encounter IVR systems I don’t want to deal with I just repeatedly cycle through the following words:

• Agent
• Human
• Operator

Usually at least one of those is treated as a trigger to forward to a normal queue. Then I usually get to deal with a human forced to do their best robot impression and strictly follow a workflow and response script.