2600 has been reviewed here before, as there's almost always something of interest in it.
That's true for the Spring 2013 edition as well.
One article that may be of use (though not necessarily for the purpose used by the author) is "The Usage of the Assumption Technique in Social Engineering" found on page 51.
Many businesses these days use "phone trees" to minimize the number of people they have to hire. The truth of the matter is that with the possible exception of choosing English or Spanish, what comes next is futility. The system just does not have the answer you're looking for, and, in many cases, these systems are designed to make it difficult to get ahold of a human being.
The course laid out by the author is to determine what assumptions the person you will ultimately get on the phone is making, and take advantage of them.
In the article, the author uses this technique to get about $30.00 of free security hardware. It is easy enough to assume, though, that many people would have reached a certain level of frustration merely trying to ascertain what the right hardware even was, and be quite happy to pay for it-which is the information the author received initially.
A moral, if there is one, is that "hacking" is not always a bad thing. The "hacking spirit" is to figure out how things work, and this is sometimes the only option available to a frustrated consumer.
