I’ve been on hold so long the music has become nostalgic.
Customer service used to mean talking to someone. Now it means navigating menus, repeating your account number, explaining your problem to a robot, and eventually developing an emotional attachment to twelve seconds of instrumental jazz.
At first, hold music is background noise. After twenty minutes, you know the melody. After an hour, you’re humming along. Eventually, it stops being hold music and becomes the soundtrack to a period of your life.
Modern technology was supposed to make customer service faster. Instead, it gave us automated menus, chatbots, callback systems, support tickets, and a cheerful recorded voice reminding us that our call is very important.
That same optimism appears in Everything Is Connected to Customer Service, where the smart home discovers that connectivity mostly means having more devices capable of asking for technical support.
And Technology Has Eliminated Waiting explores another modern improvement: we don’t wait anymore. We buffer.
The impressive part isn’t that companies can keep us on hold this long.
It’s that they found music capable of surviving it.
Explore more Chad Geepeety™ cartoons about customer service, phones, waiting, automation, and technology designed to save us time.
