Dear hold music. We've been through a lot together, you and I, nearly all of it in the eleven minutes between deciding to fix something and giving up on fixing it. The water heater. The rental car counter in Boise at 11pm. That insurance claim I still don't fully understand. You have never once asked how I'm doing, and I respect the boundary.

Somebody wrote you on purpose

That's the part I can't get past. A person sat at a keyboard, picked a key, picked a tempo, picked that one specific synthesized flute out of a menu of two hundred synthesized flutes, and thought: yes, this will soothe a man whose basement is filling with water. That person had a mother. That person had opinions about reverb. Their four bars now go into more ears in a single Tuesday afternoon than most symphonies manage in a century, played back through what sounds like a tin can pressed into a pillow.

The default hold music on Cisco phone systems, the one you've heard a thousand times and couldn't name under oath, is called Opus No. 1. A teenager wrote it in his parents' garage in the late eighties. It got bundled into a phone system, the phone system went everywhere, and a kid's demo turned into one of the most heard pieces of music on earth that nobody can identify. Something almost holy in that. Something cursed too.

The saxophone knows what it did

The saxophone is not a neutral party here. When a dental group in a strip mall drops a soprano sax onto the hold loop, it's making a claim about itself: we are smooth, we are unhurried, we have a lobby with a small fountain and one fish in it. Then a woman cuts in to say all representatives are currently assisting other customers, delivered in the cadence of someone reading a hostage note, and the sax comes back eight decibels louder than it left. Every time. Nobody has ever fixed that volume jump, in any building, on any system, and by now I suspect it's load bearing.

Your greatest hits

For the record, and with genuine affection, the canon:

  • The four bar loop with an audible seam, so the splice comes around every twelve seconds like a car with a flat.
  • "Your call is very important to us," a sentence that has never once been true in the entire history of sound.
  • The half second of silence that makes you sit up and say hello into a dead line, which is a small public humiliation even when you're completely alone.
  • The hold message that turns out to be an ad for the company you are, at that exact moment, actively trying to hand money to.

Somewhere out there is a person who sincerely likes one of these. Picture a credit union in Ohio with a marimba loop, and a guy sitting in the parking lot with the engine off, humming along. I don't need to meet him. I just need to know he's possible. (Probably the same crowd that defends airport carpet, so weigh it accordingly.)

The part that stopped being funny

What you actually are, and I say this gently, is a confession set to music. Hold music is a business admitting in B flat that it knows you're there, it wants your money, and it has nobody free. At a bank with 300 branches, that's a staffing decision somebody made in a spreadsheet back in March. At a three truck plumbing outfit in Akron, it's a guy named Dave flat on his back under a kitchen sink, feeling his phone buzz against a floor joist, doing the math on whether he can reach it with both hands wet.

Most small businesses never even reach the dignity of a hold loop. Ringing, then voicemail, then nothing. A 411 Locals study of 85 businesses found that 62 percent of calls to small businesses go unanswered, and 85 percent of people who land in voicemail never call back, according to the Numa Small Business Phone Report. So the call doesn't sit patiently waiting for the marimba. It hangs up, dials the next plumber on the list, gets a human on the second ring, and Dave never learns the job existed.

Which is a stupid way to lose work. Nobody outbid him. Nobody was better with a wrench. He lost because he was already under somebody else's sink, doing the exact thing he's supposed to be doing.

What I'd swap you for, if you'll forgive me

Rocketship answers the phone from the business's own number, at 4 on a Tuesday and at 2 in the morning on a Sunday. It knows the hours, the services and the prices, and it answers the question the caller actually asked instead of reading out a menu of six things they didn't. The job goes straight into Google Calendar. Name and number, captured. When a live human is what the moment needs, it transfers the call to one. Free to start, paid plans from 12 dollars a month, which is very likely less than the licensing on eight bars of smooth jazz.

So this is goodbye, or at least a wave from across the road. Say hi to the flute for me.