In 2012, according to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald , an Adelaide man was kept on hold with the 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. (I have found Wittgenstein’s query, “Can time go on apart from events?” to be a useful starting point). 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.
About that music: While recently put on hold—after first enduring the “confession” ritual of pressing telephone buttons to indicate why I was calling—the sounds of 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.