Telephone call queue jump ahead device ?

Factual Questions
1

I was at a convention last week and one of my colleagues had a discussion with one of the temporary food service workers. She was complaining because they have to call a toll free number starting at 3 PM every Friday and wait on the line in a queue to get their next assignment. As I understood it someone had purchased a “black box” device that allowed them to jump to the front of the waiting line and get the first and best assignments.
The woman that owned this device would charge the temporary workers a fee to come to her house and use the device at 3 PM every Friday. I wait on tech support lines lines and I always hear the “order in which it was received” message. Not that I’d cheat or anything but I’d like to understand how it’s done. Supposedly this device cost 10 thousand dollars.

My question is:

Is such a “jump ahead” device possible and if so how does it work ?

2

Doubt it. Sounds like a neat idea, tho.

There are some back doors to get ahead of people in line, like saying the word “AGENT” while on hold for HP.

There’s a web page for stuff like that… Lemme see if I can find it.

There it is.

The only other one I know is the old Radio Promo Deal where you add one or two to the number to bypass the “Circle Hunt” PBX system.

It sometimes works.

Phil

3

I used to run a call center, including managing the queuing computer.

Once some machine at our end has answered your ringing line, your call is under that machine’s control. Nowadays it’s a computer; they used to be dedicated telephone hardware.

What happens to your call is totally under the computer’s control. It can rearrange the queue however it’s programmed, perhaps to put the 800-number callers ahead of the local callers to save money for the company paying the 800 bill. It can ask for your account number and resort the queue so good or high-spending customers move up a bit and smallfry move down a bit.

There is no way to influence the machine’s process from your end UNLESS the software at their end was designed to permit that.

Further, the only means you have to communcate with that software is via ordinary touchtones. So some fancy $10,000 box is simply a hoax.

For example, perhaps the software is programmed such that touch-toning 9993 while listening to the “Your call is important to us” message will trigger your call jumping to top of queue.

Or maybe it’s *#876 but only while the music is playing. Or maybe there’s no code that’ll affect your place in the queue. Most often there is one so managers can call in and jump to the top, but for obvious reasons the code tends to be obscure.

Most importantly, there’s no way for you to determine, other than by experimentation, how they’ve programmed their system.

If you or someone you knew worked in their telecom dept, you could determine which hardware and software they use and perhaps try the default queue-jump codes which some (not all) programs have. Or you might be able to sweet-talk one of the programmers into telling you how exactly how they’ve got it programmed.

Other than that, it’s simply guesswork. You’d be looking for a needle in a haystack with no assurance the needle in fact exists. There’s certainly no nationally standardized code for this purpose.

I suspect the woman who claimed to have such a device was simply preying on the gullible. Or maybe she learned to code by accident or from somebody who worked there, and the fancy box is a stage prop, so her “customers” never realize that all they need to do is touchtone 34572#* to jump the queue.

Bottom line:

  1. Queue jumping is readily doable if you have the secret code.
  2. Each company’s queue will be programmed differently.
  3. Discovering the secret code by experimentation is all but impossible. Better to try “social engineering”, i.e. finding somebody who knows the code and tricking them into telling you.
4

I’ve had good luck in the past when particularly impatient by ignoring any number punching and playing the “Please hold the line if you are dialing from a rotary phone”. Maybe they go to the end of the line, but it didn’t seem like it.

It worked a couple times anyway.

5

Even if this device did exist, what, this woman rounded up 10 thou, hopped over to the Sharper Image and put the thing on her kitchen table just so minimum wage workers could come over and give her a few bucks to use it? Yep.

6

Run several large call centers. Doubt the claim. Dont’ see how you could get to the front of a queue.