To talk, or not to talk?

There are times when you want to talk to a real person, and find yourself slogging through various levels of voice mail torture ("Press 1 for sales ... Press 2 for service ... Press 3 for billing questions ....") until you find yourself wanting to throw the phone at something.

But then again, there are times when, for whatever reason, you'd rather leave a voice-mail message than talk to a real person. Maybe you need to tell chatty Aunt Cathy something important but don't have time to listen to her talk about how her flower garden is doing.

In either case, technology can come to the rescue.

Let's start with the business voice mail problem.

Fonolo (fonolo.com) is a service which allows you to navigate through the voice-mail menus for various large companies online. You figure out where you want to go, and then Fonolo makes the call, goes through the various menu options, and then calls you once it's gotten to the right point in the menu. Fonolo will even, if you're comfortable with this, save your account number for frequently-dialed companies which require you to key it in every time you call.

The service is free; Fonolo makes its money by offering its services to businesses to try to make their customer service experience more user-friendly.

But what about the times when talking to a real person is the last thing on your list? I first learned about Slydial (slydial.com) from the Netted By The Webbys daily newsletter, an offshoot of the Webbys, a web site award program. Slydial is a service that automatically puts you directly through to a mobile phone number's voicemail account, without even trying to ring the actual phone itself.

There's a free, ad-supported version of the service, as well as a paid premium service which does away with the ads. The premium service also works with for all four major smartphone platforms: iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Passive-aggressive? Sure it is. But I think anyone can think of times when it might be useful, even courteous. If you think the person you were calling might be in a meeting, Slydial is one way to keep from triggering their ringtone in a setting where it might be embarrassing.

Then there are the people you never, ever want to talk to. If you've ever gotten unwanted telemarketing calls, or mysterious calls that beep at you, WhoCallsMe (whocallsme.com) is a user-compiled reverse phone lookup site specializing in weird unwanted calls. It requires, of course, that you have Caller ID, so that you can see the caller's number, which you then enter into the web site's search box. You can then see reports from others who were called by that same number. At the very least, this information could be useful in determining whether an unwanted call is malicious or accidental -- for example, someone who has entered the wrong number on a fax machine with an automatic redial feature.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.