Since I upgraded Asterisk it has this bug that as soon a DTMF tone is played on the line, Asterisk crashes.

So I cannot navigate any menu and when requested to make a choice, I just don't make one and wait. Turns out that this has been pretty effective in getting a real person on the other end relatively fast.

I don't know what it is, maybe it's a legal requirement, maybe so that people too dumb to use a phone still get serviced.

IDK if any pulse dialing phones (as opposed to DTMF) are still capable of reaching the phone network at large, but I'd imagine that's the use case.

That is quite an unexpected benefit to such a serious bug.