It's a common frustration. You have a problem, concern, or complaint, and you want to reach out to the company or service involved. Try as you might, you can't find a phone number. If you do, you find an endless phone tree of automated assistance options — or worse, a scam.

As far as you can tell, there's no way to locate a real person.

There probably isn't, and the reason is simple.

People are expensive. Incredibly expensive. Even when they're overseas, compared to automated or self-service alternatives, people are still costly and often unreliable.

Let's explore the alternatives.

Password recovery questions, more commonly called security questions (or secret questions and answers), are used to verify you as the legitimate owner of an online account when you've forgotten your password or are otherwise trying to recover an online account.

Apparently, in filling out your online job application, you created such an account. More commonly, security questions are associated with email, banking, and social media accounts.

I'll look at how they work, when they're needed, how they fail, when you can make up your own, and what to do if you can't.

And perhaps most importantly, why you shouldn't use them at all, if you have a choice.

If you're not backed up … back up NOW!

It's almost certainly not malware; it's very likely your hard disk is close to failure. There's one thing I want you to try first, but then you should plan on replacing it.

I'll run through your list and tell you what's worth paying attention to, what's not, and why.

This question and its variants are incredibly common.

Unfortunately, the answer is rarely simple. Changing an email address often means one thing to the person asking and something very different to the services that provide email.

Some services make the change easy(ish).

Others? Not so much.