Press 1 if you hate talking to a device

As the man generally regarded as the father of the automated switchboard, Peter Theis knows he has a lot to answer for.

"I'm the guy who did it, yeah," 70-year-old Theis said. "I am ultimately to blame. I'm Dr. Frankenstein."

It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. The technology that many consumers believe serves no purpose but to prevent them from reaching a living, breathing service rep is in fact an electronic stew of a variety of systems.

But it was Theis who, in the early 1970s, cobbled together the nuts and bolts of what's known today as interactive voice response, which is what allows a computer to respond to touch tones or spoken words with seemingly endless corridors of automated options.

"When I invented it, I knew this would be huge," he told me. "My goal was to improve the efficiency of call centers. I never thought that people would misapply the technology."

I've been wrestling with automated switchboards as I try to set up phone service, TV service, Internet service and every other service for our new house in Los Angeles (a.k.a. the money sponge).

Time Warner Cable's machine hung up on me no fewer than three times before I finally got through to a human being who could answer a few questions.

Verizon's automated switchboard pummeled me with about a dozen questions before connecting me to a real person, who then asked me to repeat the exact same information.

And for a textbook example of how automated switchboards can be so bamboozling that callers may hang up in frustration before getting anywhere close to a human being, try dialing the L.A. city clerk's office at (213) 978-1133.

Don't you just love how virtually every recorded message begins with a warning that the menu has recently changed, so don't do anything until you sit through the whole spiel? Or how the system is invariably programmed to not offer access to an honest-to-goodness service rep until the very end of the process?

So what dark corner of hell is responsible for this diabolical technology? That would be Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

This is where engineers at what was known as the Collins radio division of Rockwell International -- today it's part of a company called Aspect Software -- faced a challenge from Continental Airlines to come up with some way for passengers' calls to be more efficiently funneled to reservation agents.