A musical interlude

I spend a lot of my workday listening to music, or at least brief snippets of music. "Company X - can you hold please?" and we're off.

There's a whole range of hold music out there. Many times the hold music is soft jazz, or light classical. I've so far only encountered one company that used the classic "Muzak" - an arrangement of the Beatles "In My Life" for harpsichord and Pan flute. (And they kept me on hold for the whole song.)

Occasionally I get internal advertising for the company itself, which can be interesting to find out what the company does. (We are discouraged from doing research before calling - just dial the number and stop wasting time.) Just good to know what's going on before they pick up the phone or transfer you to voice mail.

The ones that crack me up are the ones that put on radio signals. Aside from being illegal (learned from my days at Muzak), you might just hear competitor's commercials while on hold. Not good.

Internally, we have a Miles Davis song I actually used to like, and probably will again once it's no longer a Pavlovian trigger for annoyance at having to waste my time waiting for a department who never picks up their damn phone.

For external calls, we have no hold music. Which requires telling people we have no hold music, so they don't think we've hung up on them. Don't know why we can't inflict Miles Davis on them as well.

The other musical interludes I get during the day are ringback tones. Ringback tones are a sort of face to the world - sometimes a favorite song, sometimes a sentiment to express religious devotion, or a pose to show how cool you might happen to be.

Some are funny, some are great songs, and some are just plain disturbing (the woman who had a song where the singer proclaimed over and over, "Daddy, will you be my Daddy? Oh Daddy, I need a Daddy..." made my skin crawl every time I called).

Answering machines are a whole separate post. But I leave you with what would be my ringback tone (it's the chorus section for the tone) if my phone weren't too old to load one on: