Facing the music on hold on the telephone
On-hold music is taken for granted nowadays but there's history and science behind the service, as Tom Vanderbilt reveals
In 2012, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, an Adelaide man was kept on hold with Australian airline Qantas for 15 hours. As a recorded message affirmed, over and over, that a customer service agent would be with him "soon", he simply stayed on - working, reading, waiting. As he told the newspaper: "I wanted to find out what exactly they meant when they said they would be with me as soon as possible."
Many of us are no doubt plunged into our own philosophical inquiries into the nature of time as we wait - albeit not to such lengths - on hold. Being on hold is the true purgatory of modern existence, a place of temporary damnation, filled not with cleansing fire but a gentle wash of music, punctuated by occasional glimpses ("your call is important to us") of the promised land.
When it comes to waiting on the phone, something is better than nothing
About that music: while recently put on hold, the overture to Handel's Water Music came through the earpiece of my iPhone. I would not say it came "pouring" through so much as "dribbling"; monaural, faded by distance, troubled by hiccupy signal dropouts.
As I listened, I became aware of the oddity of the situation: Water Music is a work executed by a German-born, England-adopted composer for a politically important "water party" on the River Thames in the summer of 1771. How strange that this 18th-century riverboat dance music should now provide the sonic backdrop to the eventual fulfilment of a 21st-century customer service experience. Handel had written tafelmusik - literally, "table music", for guests at table - but could he have known he also writing telefonmusik?
But then I wondered: who had the idea that there should be a soundtrack at all? Perhaps surprisingly, given that select late 19th-century audiences in Europe had actually received live opera broadcasts via telephone, the idea of hold music doesn't seem to have appeared until fairly late in the 20th century.
What we may now forget is that, in the early days, one stayed "on hold" simply to make the call. It probably seemed a small price to pay. Writing about the first telephone call from New York to Paris, in 1928 (the first transatlantic call had been two years earlier between London and New York), The New York Times described the dizzy experience: "For those who speak for the first time there is no thrill comparable to that which comes with first signal. 'Your New York call is coming through.' Hold the line. Wait a minute. That minute is a thing of very mixed emotions. One feels that something memorable should be spoken and can think of nothing to say."