Please Hold

February 19, 2004 - Please Hold

Waiting on hold to talk to the phone, cable, electricity, or gas company is one of those things they left out of the brochure when they lured us into the adult world. I guess they left out a lot of things … go ask Louie. Being on hold is like being nowhere, or maybe Mojave. Ed says, never get gas in Mojave. And who are we to question?

Yesterday the dedicated staff of edhat.com ventured into the land of hold, where the music plays all day and night, and they keep stringing you along with promises of representatives, associates, and other providers of service who are all currently busy. Busy doing what, we ask?

But, yesterday, the trick was on them. Because we didn’t need their stinking service! We were only going to remain on the phone long enough to hear their eager and friendly voices. And once we verified that they were in fact real voices from real people, we would hang up!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

We were timing how long the company would take to connect us to a real person. So, when the real person answered (using an alias, no doubt), our work was done. It was on to the next number.

Now, the process of actually getting hold of a real person is not that easy. They make you choose options, type in account numbers, phone numbers, street numbers, and social security numbers. You can’t just push zero like in the old days! But, even when the right buttons are pushed, and there are people available to answer, the connection is not lickety-split. In fact, we were never able to connect to anyone in less than a minute. Instead, we heard messages informing us how our privacy and security might be compromised by our upcoming conversation. They also spent time enticing us toward their automatic and online systems.

We made multiple calls to each company. Our longest wait was 12 ¼ minutes (Edison at lunchtime). Our shortest was 63 seconds (Verizon). The average wait time for all four companies was about 3 minutes. Individual averages were as follows: Verizon (1 minute 17 seconds), Gas Company (1 minute 45 seconds), Cox (3 minute 52 seconds), and Edison (5 minutes 23 seconds).

edhat subscribers were way off the mark yesterday. The most popular choice for longest, Verizon, was actually the shortest. Only one person had the top two ... a person who’s name is ‘Mud’. We will be contacting Mud to arrange for prize delivery. If Mud does not hear from us, he/she can call 555-5555 and follow the voice prompts.

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