Call in with a generic question to any company you have a financial account with (bank, cc, mortgage, government, etc). They know who you are from the phone number you called from, and you can often retrieve account details like balances and transactions without entering further info. Talk to an agent though with a question that has nothing to do with any confidential information and they won't answer it until they go through 5-10 questions to verify your identity. Today the lady had to put me on hold "to document the call". Then of course, is the survey they want you to take afterwards. Something that could have been answered in about 20sec stretched into almost 10 minutes. No wonder its so hard to get through to some of these places by phone. Since I declined the phone survey I've already gotten the "how did we do" email survey. Definitely going to fill that one out with my thoughts on all this.