ON HOLD
When you get the dreaded message, “Please hold, your call is very important to us … if you care to leave a message and have us call you back …” don’t you wonder at the irony? You may or may not have called them in response to a message they left for you to call them back, and are then offered the option to leave a message so they can call you back and they in turn will have to leave a message because by the time they call you back you have left on a trip to Lapland.
Get real! Who in their right mind would want to start the whole sequence of annoying phone tag all over again. I cannot believe that everyone doesn’t understand they will most likely call you back during some domestic crisis, or while you are making a pit stop, when you are in the shower, or have just put milk on your cereal. So of course you elect to hang on. You have their number, as it were.
However, when they announce, in a Living Dead Zombie Voice, “You are number 15 in line waiting to speak to customer service…” you pause, calculate and contemplate, because that is a pretty significant number … Hmmmm …. number 15. Well perhaps, maybe I should leave a message after all. However, as you dither and listen to scritchy-scatchy unidentifiable muzak, the Living Dead Zombie Voice cuts in and announces, “You are now caller number 4 …” Aha! Progress you think! But, after a couple of loops of audio dreck, you are offered once again the option to leave a message.
Do they know something you don’t?
Well hello! Eleven people have hung up because they have other things to do with their time. They have lives. Only you and 2 others are willing to devote significant amounts of time listening to the sound of loud digitally enhanced hyperactive insects dancing in your ear! Seriously … where do they find the non-musical-musicly-offensive rubbish that repeats endlessly in your ear?
Oh wait, “You are now caller number 1 …” Okay, hang in there. Hang in there! You can do this! You begin to fantasize that the annoying do-loop of sound will self destruct and bring you audiological relief. And then, just before you cut off your ear to ease the aggravation, Living Dead Zombie Voice kills the muzak and announces, “Your call is being recorded for quality control … Hello…”
Sigh … I guess irony is lost on quality control customer service and all those oxymoronic types that create on-hold-muzak and telephone menu options. Why not just record NYC street sounds. put that on the loop, and free us all from those muzak-inions and their endless war against sanity.