Everyone has been driven crazy by a poorly staffed call center, sitting behind a horrible Interactive Voice Response Unit (IVRU) while calling a service provider like the phone company, cable company, government office or technical support. Well, help has now arrived.

Paul English, the CTO of Kayak.com, decided to build a site to help people get through to a real human after one such frustrating call. The result is GetHuman.com.

He also took it one step further, developing a fair and comprehensive rating system based upon a set of 10 standards.

The GetHuman 500 includes instructions on how to reach a human for 500 of the largest companies and governmental offices people have to deal with regularly. There is also a user submitted database of many additional companies in the discussion forums.

Tags: AOL, Apple, ATT-CallVantage, Bank-of-America, Best-Buy, Comcast, CompUSA, Costco, Dell, GetHuman, Help, Home-Depot, Home-Shopping-Network, JP-Morgan, Kayak, Microsoft, MSN, Qwest, SBC, Service, Sheraton, Sony, Sprint-PCS, Starwood, Tech-Support, Time-Warner, Web Links

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