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April 28, 2018 6:18 PM   Subscribe

 
All the ads I've seen for Public Mobile tout that they are the phone company without a phone number... so how does one phone them to listen to that epic hold music?

Love the post!
posted by invokeuse at 6:29 PM on April 28, 2018


Must add: one of my favorite Gotye songs from that 15 minutes he was popular and putting out odd but enjoyable songs: "Thanks For Your Time" (it's kind of sad that no corporation has had enough of a sense of humor to use it as hold music)
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:42 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


Having just spent half an hour on the line with Spectrum, I have... feelings about this.
posted by sysinfo at 7:08 PM on April 28, 2018


Points to Shopify for the Chrono Trigger cover, though.
posted by sysinfo at 7:12 PM on April 28, 2018


Play Along with Sprint

He could've at least tuned to the recording. Gah.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:13 PM on April 28, 2018


When my friend in Thailand puts me on hold, the music is always amazing...very pleasant acoustic guitar jazzy stuff, somewhat like the Sprint music. I've been trying to figure out what it is for a while, but so far no dice.

Awesome post!
posted by tarshish bound at 7:17 PM on April 28, 2018


My local ISP just has a sound of someone clucking their tongue, as though they're trying to come up with a ballpark quote on how long I'll be on hold, like: "Oh gosh, that'll probably be...(cluck cluck cluck click cluck)..oh, I dunno, prolly 'bout, mmm, say, ..(cluck cluck cluck click click clock cluck)...20 minutes?"

My company's in-house webconference hold music is a late-70's Metheny-esque flaccid derivative guitar, without any actual edge or art.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:27 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Public Mobile one grew on me. Squirrel facts!
posted by tarshish bound at 7:29 PM on April 28, 2018


I enjoyed this.

The other day I was trying to videoconference to a meeting at another college, and we all learned via the deeply weird institutional hold music that there is such a thing as a ragtime version of Fur Elise.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:40 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


I don't know if it has changed in the last few years but for a while Xerox customer service had "Classical Gas" and "Music Box Dancer" as their hold music. Which, fine, but it was just those two. So on the rare occasions I was on hold for more than five minutes, it got a little repetitive.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 7:56 PM on April 28, 2018


Fun Fact: The authors of Opus No 1. wrote it on a 4-track in high school. Later one of them went to work for Cisco, and the rest is history.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:12 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


Noch mal, auf Deutsch, bitte: The Beez: Die Warteschleife.
posted by fedward at 8:55 PM on April 28, 2018


Don't forget about Extension 666, the place to send unwanted lying coldcallers who won't say no but can't hang up, the previously-seen bunko scream jar.
posted by JHarris at 10:36 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


Tim Carleton & Darrick Deel's "Opus No. 1"
- I love how this piece of music is all fine and calming and anodyne - right up until the very ominous last chord. That conveys something to me a little like "to vent our ire at you holding with with us so long we have just mailed your customer data to Cambridge Analytica".
posted by rongorongo at 11:06 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]


Mr Moofoo, I just learned that the melody to "Music Box Dancer" has been lurking dormant in my brain for the last 30 years, just waiting to be brought back to life by reading your comment...
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:46 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


I dunno... do any of these really hold a candle to WordPerfect's hold jockeys from the early 1990s? As upbeat as AM-drivetime DJs, spinning tunes, cracking jokes, and telling your the Printer Support hold queue is now 27 calls deep?
posted by lhauser at 9:27 AM on April 29, 2018


I still miss Telus conferencing's MOH circa 2007: it was a medley of three or so tunes, all so bland that they were works of art. We'd call in early just to get some of that polyester cheese. One of the tunes had the Windows error ding right in the middle of the recording. We'd all crowd round the polycom and yell "DING!" when it came on.
posted by scruss at 2:11 PM on April 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


Incidentally, "Polyester Cheese" is the name of my new band. Our stage uniform is orange leisure suits.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:27 PM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


My favorite creation for the reverse of this is to send sales calls to talk to Lenny, a collection of recordings made to sound like a confused senior on the other end of the line.
posted by msbutah at 2:19 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've had thoughts of creating an icebreaker game for work conferences: identify the conference-call provider from their hold music. "Hmm, slightly upbeat solo acoustic guitar jazz, less than 30-second repeat... is it StartMeeting?"
posted by Lexica at 12:20 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


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