English has added the Today Show, Fox and Friends, and the India Times to his list of interviews, and he'll be on the CBS Early Show on the 16th.

And English is still getting warm and fuzzy e-mail from fans, like this one from Lily: "I think it's totally awesome how you found out all those ways to bypass the stupid machines. I know I'll be using your IVR cheat sheet pretty often." It's surprising how often fans nominate him for a Nobel or Noble prize (depending on their spelling ability).

We reported on how Angel has responded to Paul English, releasing a cheat sheet of their own, and launching what they call IVR University. And now, finally, we have the call center manager perspective: enter the Call Center Steel cage Death Match. It's a blog by a "cogitating call center manager" stationed somewhere in the U.S. His latest communiqué, "Angels With Dirty Faces," from December 8, is a nice recap and rant on the subject. His call center has no IVR.

Part of the problem, the Cogitating Manager says, is the IVRs are set up wrong. The other problem is that call centers often fail to recognize the humanity of the customer:

"It seems that so many in the Call Center field treat people as if they are an Alien Customer Specie to be studied - that is, they (meaning call center managers, directors, consultants, QA personnel etc) forget that customers/people are inseparable, and that trying to figure out what satisfies a customer (i.e. person) is no more complicated than asking themselves what they think is right."

The Cogitating Manager is no kinder to agent scripts:

"A greeting that sounds something like "Thank you for calling Catastrophic Bladderburst Inc, how may I provide you with superior service and unrelenting cross-selling and up-selling today?" Who likes this kind of greeting/garbage? Who? Who? Who? Nobody. It's fake, false, empty and makes the agent who has to say it 100 times a day angry."

Wasn't that refreshing? Scroll down further on his blog to read his kind words (seriously) on our editor, Keith Dawson.

In related news, the new consumer blog by the Gawker empire, The Consumerist, offers a list of phone numbers for Verizon customer service, and another for some other mobile phone companies.

We'd love to hear from you. Are you a vendor that makes IVRs? Are you a manager that has opinions about them? Do you know who Leon Ferber is? Let me know.