I just learned about the gethuman project, which is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This is a free website, run by volunteers and powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use. The most popular part of the gethuman website is the gethuman database of secret phone numbers and codes to get to a human when calling a company for customer service.
Also, here is a good blog entry that discusses the problem and the gethuman database project.