Lately, i've become quite a connoisseur of hold music.
Specifically, the sort that you hear before a conference call, and it stretches quite the gamut. i usually join conferences early so i can finish my peanut-butter and jelly sandwich along with a bag of tortilla chips (i can't be understood, nor can i hear you clearly. It's like being in a dietary isolation booth.)
Thing is, depending on where you're calling and how low they happened to bid for the contract, you get just about everything. At the high end, there's usually a custom crafted list of tunes that you can hear. This is what places like Coke offer since they expect you to be on that line for quite some time. Depending on exactly how long you tie up their phone system, this can either be a pleasant stroll through childhood memories, or the soundtrack to your next dozen nightmares.
In the middle are the sites that ran an audio cable from the radio or someone's iPod. i used to work at a company that did that. i don't know if the boss was aware that for the month of December, our hold music featured the Jingle Cats.
At the low end, is the custom happy corporate music loop. This is a track that is the product of one person and a rack of synthesizers creating a "track that meets our Company Vision Statement in an up-tempo, proactive manner and doesn't use those C-Flats because our test group didn't like being stuck in a room listening to that." For reasons i never understand, it's like someone who'd been listening to way too much house techno and just got a copy of Garageband and 15 minutes to come up with a 60 second loop. This is the remains of someone's soul.
If two hours of corporate jingles would be featured in your nightmares, this loop is what hell sounds like, complete with perky, happy operators pleasantly informing you that your eternal suffering is important to them, and that a slithering horror of the netherworld will be with you shortly.
Guess what i get to listen to most of the time?
*sigh*
Oontz-oontz-oontz-When it comes to your endless torment, you've got choices. Thank you for choosing us, even if you had no idea at the time-oontz-oontz-oontz…
BigMac: Ours is a slice of relaxing heaven compared to the one I had to sit through on Friday. Seriously. It was like a Lawrence Welk dance mix done by a Flock of Seagulls.
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Good news my friend. Our little 60 second loop of insanity is going to be changed very soon :)